As usage of Anthropic’s coding-focused AI tools has surged, the company is now tweaking its pricing model in a way that could make it significantly more expensive for some enterprise users.
The Information reported Tuesday that Anthropic is shifting Claude Enterprise subscriptions away from a flat fee of up to $200 per user per month to a model that charges based on computing usage, on top of a $20 monthly fee per user.
Claude Enterprise is Anthropic’s business-focused bundle, which includes tools like Claude Code and Claude Cowork. These products are particularly compute-intensive, often running for extended periods of time to complete complex tasks. However, as adoption of these tools has grown, so have the costs required to run them, putting pressure on Anthropic’s margins. The Information reported that weekly active users of Claude Code doubled between January and February.
Fredrik Filipsson, co-founder of Redress Compliance, which helps companies negotiate software licensing agreements, told the outlet the changes could potentially triple costs for some enterprise customers.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo. However, a spokesperson told The Information the changes are meant to better reflect how customers actually use Claude, noting that under the previous system, some users hit usage limits that interrupted their work, while others didn’t fully use the capacity they paid for.
The changes come amid growing complaints online that Anthropic may have made recent tweaks to its models that worsened their performance.
One particular complaint, posted to GitHub in February by a senior director at AMD, has since gone viral across social media.
In the post, Stella Laurenzo wrote that Claude Code could no longer be trusted for complex engineering work. She said the model appeared to decline in performance in February compared to January, including ignoring instructions and providing “simplest fixes” that were incorrect.
Users on X began sharing screenshots of the post this month, with one writing, “basically: anthropic sneakily turned down how hard claude thinks before editing code, changed the default from “high” to “medium” effort, and hid the reasoning from session logs. all without telling users.”
Claude Code creator Boris Cherny responded on X, calling the allegation “false.”
“We defaulted to medium as a result of user feedback about Claude using too many tokens. When we made the change, we (1) included it in the changelog and (2) showed a dialog when you opened Claude Code so you could choose to opt out. Literally nothing sneaky about it — this was us addressing user feedback in an obvious and explicit way.” Cherny wrote.
These are just the latest examples of how AI companies will need to tweak both their products and pricing strategies as demand for their models explodes and investors insist on seeing a path to profitability after unprecedented levels of investment.
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