Anthropic tests removing Claude Code from Pro, then restores the pricing page

• GergelyOrosz's pricing-page screenshot and simonw's earlier post both captured Anthropic showing Claude Code as excluded from the $20 Pro plan and available only on Max tiers.
• In TheAmolAvasare's clarification, Anthropic said the change was a test for about 2% of new prosumer signups, and TheAmolAvasare's follow-up said existing Pro and Max subscribers were not affected.
• GergelyOrosz's follow-up check and theo's complaint both said the pricing grid appeared broadly visible, which turned the stated 2% scope into the main controversy.
• By the time GergelyOrosz's reversion post and simonw's reversion note went up, Claude Code was back on Pro in the pricing grid, but neither cited a formal Anthropic announcement explaining the rollback.
• theo's new-account test added one more wrinkle: a new Pro signup still reached Claude Code through onboarding, even while the pricing page said otherwise.

You can compare the live Claude pricing page, the support article Using Claude Code with your Max plan, and Simon Willison's running write-up, Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not. There is also a blunt competitive response, where thsottiaux's post said Codex would stay in OpenAI's free and $20 Plus plans.

The whole blowup started with a tiny checkbox change in Anthropic's pricing grid. simonw's screenshot showed Claude Code removed from Pro while Claude Cowork stayed there, and GergelyOrosz's later screenshot showed the same layout.

That combination was unusually combustible because it implied Anthropic was willing to leave a higher-touch agent feature on Pro while moving the CLI coding agent to $100 and $200 plans.

Anthropic's only clear explanation in the evidence pool came from Amol Avasare. In TheAmolAvasare's main reply, he said the company was running a small test on about 2% of new prosumer signups, while TheAmolAvasare's thread said Max had been designed for heavy chat usage before Claude Code, Cowork, and long-running async agents changed how subscribers use the product.

His thread laid out three concrete reasons for rethinking plan design:

• Max launched before Claude Code existed on the subscription stack TheAmolAvasare's background post.
• Claude Code usage jumped after Opus 4, and Cowork also shipped TheAmolAvasare's usage-shift post.
• Subscriber engagement rose enough that Anthropic had already tightened weekly caps and peak-time limits TheAmolAvasare's capacity note.

The unresolved part was distribution. While Anthropic said 2%, GergelyOrosz's check across devices said he could not get the old page to appear, and theo's challenge said everyone he spoke to rolled the new grid.

A few hours later, the pricing grid flipped back. GergelyOrosz's reversion post said Claude Code was once again part of Pro, and simonw's update said Anthropic had reverted the page without publishing a clear policy statement.

That left an odd paper trail. jeremyphoward's doc link noted that Anthropic had also edited support documentation during the test window, which made the whole thing look more substantial than a stray visual experiment.

The support docs were not just lagging behind a UI test. In jeremyphoward's post, the linked help article had already been updated to frame Claude Code around Max, which means the pricing page and documentation moved together at least briefly.

That matters because it narrows the set of plausible explanations. A one-off frontend bug can misrender a checkbox. Changing the public support article points to a coordinated experiment, even if the rollout itself later got reverted.

The cleanest new fact after the rollback came from an actual signup flow. In theo's signup test, Theo said he created a new Pro account, saw no warning during signup or checkout, clicked the onboarding path for development, and still landed in the Claude Code install flow successfully.

That account-level behavior fits with simonw's later note, which said the likely bug was showing the experimental pricing grid worldwide when it was only supposed to be visible to a small slice of signups. The page copy changed, the docs changed, but at least one fresh Pro account still got the product.