Anthropic's pricing test for Claude Code sparks confusion and criticism

Anthropic quietly updated its claude.com/pricing page on 22nd April 2026, making Claude Code exclusive to $100/month or $200/month Max plans instead of the previous $20/month Pro plan. The change sparked immediate backlash on Reddit, Hacker News, and Twitter. Anthropic's Head of Growth Amol Avasare tweeted that the company was running a small test on approximately 2% of new prosumer signups, with existing Pro and Max subscribers unaffected. OpenAI's Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux responded by emphasizing that Codex would remain available in both free and $20/month PLUS plans, criticizing Anthropic's lack of transparency. The author Simon Willison expressed concern about accessibility for educational purposes, noting that he teaches coding agents for data analysis at the NICAR data journalism conference. Willison pays $200/month for Claude Max but questioned whether Claude Code's reputation could withstand a jump from $20 to $100/month. Anthropic appeared to reverse course shortly after the controversy, restoring the checkbox for Claude Code in the Pro column on the pricing page, though without official communication. The incident raised questions about Anthropic's testing culture and potential brand damage.