Anthropic opens 10,000 Claude seats to scientists, free or $15 a month

Anthropic is putting Claude subscriptions in front of academic labs at a price that removes the argument about budget. On August 27 it announced a Claude team plan for scientists with 10,000 seats open worldwide for one year. Standard seats cost nothing, and premium seats with 5x usage limits cost $15 per month. The company says it intends to extend the program well beyond the initial 10,000 seats over the coming months.

How the seats are claimed

The unit is the lab, not the individual. To register you fill in a verification form, and you have to be a principal investigator or the equivalent at an academic or nonprofit research institution. Once verified, you add the researchers in your lab to the plan yourself.

This sits on top of Claude Science, the product Anthropic launched in June that connects the tools researchers already use, produces auditable artifacts, and hands out compute. The subscription is the access; Claude Science is what the access is for.

Credits on top of the subscription

When a lab burns through what a standard or premium plan gives it, the next step is the AI for Science program, which grants up to $50,000 in credits per project. Any researcher may apply, without the principal investigator requirement that gates the seats.

The scope of that program is what actually changed. Until now Anthropic largely funded biological sciences; it is now inviting compute-heavy work in other fields, and it names progress on the Riemann zeta function alongside protein design as the kind of project it has in mind.

Which models a scientist actually gets

Access is not uniform, and the announcement is direct about it. Researchers working in biology and chemistry stay limited to Opus-class models, and Claude Fable models will keep refusing professional biology and drug development queries because of dual-use risk. A free seat does not mean an unrestricted model.

There is a separate track for the work those refusals block. Anthropic says it is building an access program with the US government that would let life sciences professionals use Mythos-class models for research and development, and that the first participants are already enrolled. Nothing about its size or terms has been published yet.