Anthropic is Giving Away Claude Max to Open-Source Maintainers

Anthropic has announced Claude for Open Source Programme, offering six months of free Claude Max 20x access to eligible open-source maintainers.

The company said the initiative aims to support developers who maintain widely used public repositories. “Open-source maintainers and contributors keep the ecosystem running,” Anthropic stated, describing the programme as a way to thank contributors for their work.

Claude Max 20x costs $200 per month, effectively valuing the six-month offer at $1,200 per eligible maintainer.

To qualify, applicants must be a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repository with more than 5,000 GitHub stars or more than 1,000,000 monthly NPM downloads. Anthropic added that maintainers must have made commits, released, or reviewed pull requests within the past three months.

If a public repository has multiple maintainers, each of then need to apply individually, said Anthropic. 

“If you maintain something the ecosystem quietly depends on, apply anyway and tell us about it,” said Anthropic on the application page. 

Eligible developers can apply through Anthropic’s website. 

“So much of what makes Claude Code great came from feedback from OSS developers. Excited we can give back a little,” Boris Cherny, the co-creator of Claude Code, said in a post on X. 

Claude Max offers higher usage limits than the $20-per-month Claude Pro plan. The Max 20x plan offers 20x the usage of Claude Pro. Claude Max also includes access to Claude Code, the AI-powered CLI coding tool. 

Reacting to the announcement, one developer on X wrote, “I genuinely love this. Open source developers ship the most important software in the world, and most never get paid for it.”

One researcher wrote on X, “In a world where agents increasingly write more and more code it's a shared interest that open source maintainers get access to the most powerful agents.”