Anthropic Enterprise Edition now charges based on usage, and heavy users' costs may double or triple.

ME News Report, April 15 (UTC+8), according to 1M AI News monitoring, Anthropic has recently shifted Claude Enterprise from a fixed subscription model to a usage-based billing system over the past few weeks. Previously, enterprise customers paid a maximum of $200 per person per month, which included a certain amount of discounted token usage; now it has been changed to a base seat fee of $20 per month per person plus additional charges based on actual compute consumption. Fredrik Filipsson, co-founder of software licensing consulting firm Redress Compliance, estimates that some heavy users will see costs double or triple. Companies with fewer than 150 employees are unaffected, and Team subscriptions (up to $100 per person per month) remain unchanged. Anthropic states that under the old model, some customers frequently hit usage limits, causing work interruptions, while others did not fully utilize their paid quotas. The new model “better reflects the shift in workload from fixed seats to agent-based usage.” The direct driving factor is the surge in usage of Claude Code and AI work assistant Claude Cowork, which are agent-based products capable of running continuously for long periods or executing scheduled tasks, with compute consumption far exceeding traditional dialogue scenarios. Sudip Roy, former head of inference at Cohere and co-founder of Adaption Labs, points out that subscription pricing is essentially based on the assumption that users will not fully utilize their quotas; once agents consume the full quota, “profit margins are severely eroded.” This is not an issue unique to Anthropic. Replit and Cursor already adjusted their pricing last summer due to cost pressures from agent products, and Salesforce also adopted usage-based billing when launching Agentforce at the end of 2024. When AI agents can continuously consume compute resources, the underlying assumption of seat-based pricing no longer holds. OpenAI, on the other hand, took the opposite approach: in early April, it launched a new Codex subscription tier at $100 per person per month (with quotas between the $20 basic plan and the $200 Pro plan), attempting to attract teams that require cost predictability with a fixed price. (Source: BlockBeats)