Anthropic Unveils Paid Plan for Its AI Chatbot: Enhance Your Experience Today!

Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI employees, has officially launched its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan, Claude Pro, designed for Claude 2 — their advanced AI-powered chatbot that excels at text analysis.

For a monthly fee of $20 in the U.S. or £18 in the U.K., Claude Pro users receive "5x more usage" than what's available in the free tier of Claude 2. Subscribers enjoy the ability to send significantly more messages, priority access to Claude 2 during peak usage times, and early access to newly introduced features.

Claude Pro is priced similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, which is a paid plan for ChatGPT — a direct competitor to Claude 2. “Since our launch in July, we've heard from users that they prefer Claude as their daily AI assistant for its extended context capabilities, quicker response times, and advanced reasoning skills,” Anthropic noted in a blog update. “Many users have also expressed interest in increasing file upload options and longer conversation durations... With Claude Pro, subscribers can now enjoy 5x more access to our latest model.”

Claude Pro users can send a minimum of 100 messages to Claude 2 every eight hours, a reset period, compared to the 50-message limit within three hours for ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Why do these limits exist? Anthropic clarifies in a support document that running a sophisticated model like Claude 2 requires substantial computational resources, especially when processing large attachments and extended conversations. “We established these limits to ensure broader access for everyone to try Claude for free while providing power users the capacity to incorporate Claude into their everyday tasks.”

AI chatbots such as Claude 2 require significant hosting budgets. For instance, OpenAI was reported to be spending around $700,000 daily, totaling approximately $21 million monthly, to operate ChatGPT.

The message limits in Claude 2 can be quickly consumed during lengthy discussions, especially with large file uploads. For example, if a Claude Pro subscriber uploads "The Great Gatsby," they would have only about 20 remaining messages available within the next eight-hour timeframe due to Claude 2’s need to “re-read” the entire conversation—attachments included—each time a message is received.

As previously reported, Anthropic aspires to develop a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-learning," as described in a recent investor pitch. This ambitious algorithm aims to create virtual assistants capable of managing emails, conducting research, and generating creative works such as art and literature—capabilities we’ve already seen with sophisticated models like GPT-4.

Since its inception in 2021, under the leadership of former OpenAI VP Dario Amodei, Anthropic has raised $1.45 billion at a valuation in the single-digit billion range. While this amount is substantial, it significantly falls short of the estimated $5 billion the company anticipates needing over the next two years to realize its AI vision.

Most of the funding, including revenue from offerings like Claude Pro, will be allocated toward expanding computational capacity. In its pitch, Anthropic suggests that it depends on clusters featuring “tens of thousands of GPUs” for model training and will require around $1 billion for infrastructure in the coming 18 months.

Anthropic claims to have "thousands" of current customers and partners, including Quora, which provides access to Claude 2 and Claude Instant—a less advanced but more affordable version of Claude 2—through its subscription-based generative AI app, Poe. However, competition is fierce from Cohere, AI21 Labs, and OpenAI, which boasts a significant user base and anticipates generating $1 billion in revenue next year.