Anthropic, an AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has launched its first premium subscription plan for its AI-powered chatbot, Claude 2. The plan, called Claude Pro, is priced at $20 per month in the U.S. and £18 in the U.K. Subscribers to Claude Pro receive 5x more usage than the free tier, the ability to send more messages, priority access during high-traffic periods, and early access to new features. The pricing of Claude Pro is the same as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, which is a competitor to Claude 2. Anthropic explains that the message limits are in place to ensure availability for free users while allowing power users to integrate Claude into their daily workflows. The company plans to use the revenue from Claude Pro and other sources to invest in compute capacity, as hosting AI chatbots like Claude 2 is expensive. Anthropic aims to create a next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching and has raised $1.45 billion in funding so far. The company has thousands of customers and partners, including Quora, but faces competition from other AI companies like Cohere and AI21 Labs.
