Anthropic on Thursday, August 27, 2026, opened 10,000 free and discounted Claude Team subscription seats for scientists, announcing an expansion of its researcher-focused programs that also widens its AI for Science credit program beyond the biological sciences.
Under the new Claude Team plan for scientists, standard seats are free and premium seats with five times the usage limits cost $15 per month, with pricing fixed for one year. Anthropic said it intends to extend the program well beyond the initial 10,000 seats over the coming months.
Eligibility and Plan Terms
Registration requires completing a verification form, and applicants must be a principal investigator or equivalent at an academic or nonprofit research institution. Once verified, a principal investigator can add the researchers in their lab to the plan.
The program page states that eligibility covers accredited universities and nonprofit research institutes, across the natural sciences, mathematics, computer science, engineering, and related fields. For-profit companies, contract research organizations, and industry R&D teams are directed to standard Team and Enterprise plans. Each plan carries between 1 and 25 seats per group, with annual billing available at $0 per standard seat and $180 per premium seat.
Anthropic’s published promotional terms set the promotional prices at $0 per standard seat per month, against a regular price of $20, and $15 per premium seat per month, against a regular $100, excluding taxes. The pricing applies for 12 months from the later of the sign-up date and the promotion’s launch date, after which seats renew at the then-current price. Labs already on Anthropic’s earlier Team plan for research labs are moved automatically to the new plan, and accounts showing no qualifying usage for 90 consecutive days may be returned to standard pricing. Anthropic also states that it does not train on users’ conversations, uploaded files, or research data.
AI for Science Credit Expansion
Alongside the subscriptions, Anthropic is expanding the scope and scale of its AI for Science program, which it first launched on May 5, 2025 to provide free API credits for high-impact scientific projects. The company said its support to date has largely gone to scientists using Claude for biological sciences, and it now intends to offer credits to researchers in other fields, including those pursuing ambitious, compute-heavy research.
Researchers whose projects outgrow their seat allocations can apply to the program for up to $50,000 in credits per project. Any researcher is eligible to apply, according to the announcement. Anthropic pointed to the kind of compute-heavy work it wants to support, citing its reported progress on the Riemann zeta function — in which an unreleased research version of Claude, working over two sessions in Claude Code, raised a longstanding lower bound on the fraction of the function’s zeros satisfying the Riemann hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2% — and Claude’s work on protein design, in which Anthropic reported that its models designed protein binders against 15 targets and succeeded on 14.
Model Access Restrictions Remain for Biology
The announcement preserves existing restrictions on Anthropic’s newest models for life sciences work. Researchers working in biology and chemistry remain limited to the company’s Opus-class models. Claude Fable models will continue to block professional biology and drug development queries because of their potential dual-use risks, the company said, pointing to its August 7, 2026 safeguards update, which said Fable 5 can outperform experts on some highly complex biological tasks and could provide significant uplift to a malicious actor.
Anthropic said it is working in partnership with the US government to establish an access program for life sciences professionals to use its Mythos-class models for life sciences research and development. The first participants have been enrolled, and the company said it expects to share more and increase access soon.
Earlier Efforts and Stated Aim
Thursday’s expansion builds on Claude Science, the AI workbench Anthropic released in beta on June 30, 2026, for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users. That product integrates the tools researchers most commonly use through a generalist coordinating agent with more than 60 curated skills and connectors pre-configured for fields including genomics, single-cell analysis, proteomics, structural biology, and cheminformatics. Anthropic said the workbench produces auditable artifacts carrying the code, environment, and message history behind each output, and provides flexible access to computing resources spanning a researcher’s laptop, a cluster over SSH, or on-demand GPUs. A reviewer agent checks citations and calculations, flagging and correcting errors.
Anthropic said its aim across the subscriptions, credits, and Claude Science product is to radically accelerate scientific discovery by helping scientists access and increase their usage of Claude.
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