Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot gets a paid plan for heavy users

Anthropic, the AI company backed by Google, has launched a paid version of its Claude chatbot in the US and UK. Priced at $20 (or £18) per month, the new Claude Pro option offers priority access when the bot is busy, early access to new features, and the ability to send more messages.

The main draw is that you’ll get five times more usage with Claude Pro when compared to the free tier, which means you can send more messages in a shorter period of time. Anthropic says the typical user will get at least 100 messages every eight hours depending on Claude’s capacity. The company says it will warn you when you have 10 messages remaining, with its limits resetting every eight hours.

Anthropic’s new Claude Pro offering puts it on track to compete with OpenAI’s $20 per month ChatGPT Plus plan. Poe, a Quora-owned hub for AI chatbots, also offers a $20 per month paid plan, and Microsoft recently launched an enterprise version of Bing Chat with increased privacy for businesses.

Anthropic first launched Claude in March, which it markets as a bot that’s “easier to converse with” and “less likely to produce harmful outputs.” While the bot was initially only available within Slack or to businesses, Anthropic launched Claude 2 to users in the US and UK in July.