Anthropic offers six months of Claude Max free to open-source maintainers
The company's new Claude for Open Source program grants half a year of its top-tier subscription to developers who meet contribution thresholds or maintain critical infrastructure.
Anthropic is giving away six months of Claude Max—its highest-tier subscription with 20× usage limits—to open-source developers who meet a set of contribution benchmarks.
The Claude for Open Source program targets library authors, core maintainers of major projects, and active contributors across the ecosystem. Qualifying criteria include authoring a library with 500+ dependent repositories, 100+ dependent packages, or 200,000+ monthly downloads in any package registry; holding official committer or maintainer status on projects like CPython, Rust, Kubernetes, or the Linux kernel; merging 100+ pull requests into external repositories over the past year; accepting 20+ pull requests from unique outside contributors into one of your own repositories in the same period; or maintaining infrastructure with an OpenSSF Criticality Score of 0.4 or higher.
Developers who don't meet the formal thresholds but contribute meaningfully to the community can still apply. The application form is live at claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss. The move positions Anthropic alongside OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, which all offer free or discounted API credits to open-source projects—but Anthropic's offer bundles the full consumer product rather than metered tokens.
