Anthropic is giving away 6 months of its most expensive Claude AI plan for free
Key Points
- Anthropic's Claude for Open Source programme gives eligible developers six months of Claude Max 20x free
- Max 20x normally costs $200 per month, putting the giveaway's value at around $1,200
- Five eligibility routes cover maintainers, core contributors, active contributors, community builders and critical infrastructure
- Anthropic encourages developers below the thresholds to apply and explain their project's impact
- Subscriptions end after six months, with prior paid plans resuming unless cancelled
Anthropic is offering open-source developers six months of Claude Max 20x, its $200-per-month top-tier plan, at no cost through its Claude for Open Source programme.
The programme is Anthropic’s way of thanking the maintainers and contributors who keep the software ecosystem running, the company said on its application page.
Successful applicants receive a subscription worth around $1,200 over the six-month period.
Max 20x is the highest tier among Anthropic’s individual subscriptions, sitting above the $20 Pro plan and the $100 Max 5x plan. It gives users 20 times the usage of Pro within each five-hour session, along with priority access at peak times and full access to Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line coding agent.
Anthropic expanded the programme’s eligibility criteria in July, replacing the original requirement of 5,000 GitHub stars or 1 million monthly downloads with five broader routes to qualify. Developers can apply under any one of the following:
- Maintainers and library authors whose packages have 500 or more dependent repos, 100 or more dependent packages, or 200,000 or more combined monthly downloads across registries such as npm, PyPI, crates.io or RubyGems
- Core contributors who are listed committers or maintainers on a recognised foundation or language project, including CPython, the Rust team, Node.js TSC, Apache PMC, CNCF, Kubernetes, the Linux kernel, Django or Rails
- Active contributors who have authored 100 or more pull requests merged into repos they don’t own in the last 12 months
- Community builders with a repo that has attracted 20 or more unique external contributors with merged pull requests in the last 12 months
- Critical infrastructure maintainers whose repo has an OpenSSF criticality score of 0.4 or above
Anthropic also told developers who fall short of those thresholds to apply anyway and explain what they maintain, provided the ecosystem quietly depends on it.
Developers on Reddit have reported acceptances for projects with as few as 25 GitHub stars, suggesting the company reviews applications on their merits rather than against a hard cut-off.
The application form asks for a name, email address and a linked GitHub repo, along with a description of the project’s reach and impact and an explanation of how the subscription will be used. Anthropic reviews applications on a rolling basis and sends programme updates to the email address attached to the applicant’s GitHub account.
The complimentary subscription ends automatically after six months, and Anthropic said it will email recipients before that happens.
Anyone who was on a paid plan beforehand returns to that plan at their previous rate unless they cancel, while everyone else drops back to the free tier.
