Anthropic opens 10,000 Claude Team seats to scientists

Anthropic is opening 10,000 Claude Team seats to labs, with free Standard access, $15 Premium seats, and up to $50,000 in project credits.

Anthropic wants to expand the use of Claude in research labs through a new pricing plan for scientists. The company is opening an initial 10,000 seats that provide one year of access to a Claude Team subscription. Standard seats are free, while Premium seats, which come with five times the usage allowance, cost $15 per month.

The offer is not available directly to every individual researcher. Applications must be submitted by a principal investigator, lab director, or someone in an equivalent position at an academic or nonprofit research institution. Once their affiliation has been verified, they can add other members of their research team to the plan.

The program page allows between one and 25 seats per group. Larger labs must contact Anthropic. Verification covers the applicant’s institution and a brief description of their research. The company says most applications should be reviewed within five to seven business days.

The discount is substantial compared with the regular price of Claude Team. A Standard seat normally costs $20 per month with annual billing, while a Premium seat costs $100 per month. Under the research program, the first becomes free and the second drops to $15 per month. Premium mainly adds greater capacity for long-running analyses and intensive sessions.

Both tiers include Claude Science, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, shared projects, file creation, and connectors to scientific databases. They also retain the administrative features of the Team plan, including centralized billing and single sign-on.

The offer is temporary. Promotional pricing applies for 12 months from enrollment, after which seats renew at the price then in effect. Anthropic says administrators will be notified before the renewal. A group showing no activity for 90 days may also lose its research pricing and return to the regular Claude Team rate after receiving notice.

The subscription limits should not be confused with dedicated computing credits. When a project exceeds the capacity of Standard or Premium seats, its members can apply to the AI for Science program. Selected projects can receive up to $50,000 in Claude credits, which may be used over several months or through the API.

Until now, this second program has focused mainly on biology and the life sciences. Anthropic is expanding it to other disciplines, including research that requires substantial computing resources. The company cites its recent work on the Riemann zeta function and protein design as examples of projects that additional credits could support.

The Team plan and AI for Science therefore address two different needs. The first equips a lab for routine work through shared projects and centralized administration. The second funds specific projects that require more capacity than a standard subscription provides and are reviewed on application. Anthropic says any researcher can apply to AI for Science without first joining the discounted Team plan.

Scientific data is not used to train Claude by default. Anthropic says conversations, uploaded files, unpublished findings, grant applications, and private datasets held under Team subscriptions remain excluded from training. Administrators can also configure the data-retention policies applied to their group’s content.

The expansion does not remove restrictions affecting the life sciences. Researchers in biology and chemistry remain limited to Opus-class models for some of their work. Claude Fable 5 continues to block professional requests involving dual-use areas such as virology, toxicology, molecular design, or drug development. When a safety filter is triggered, the request is routed to Opus 5.

A free research seat therefore does not unlock the biological capabilities of Fable or Mythos. Anthropic is working with the U.S. government on a controlled-access program that would give life sciences professionals access to Mythos-class models. The first participants have been enrolled, but detailed criteria, an expansion timeline, and eligible countries have not yet been disclosed.

The announcement significantly lowers the cost of entry for some research labs without providing universal access to Anthropic’s most advanced models. The 10,000 seats are limited, require institutional verification, and expire after one year. Anthropic nevertheless plans to expand the program beyond this initial group over the coming months.