Anthropic offers startups a free year of Claude Team, five premium seats and $1,000 in API credits

The expanded Claude for Startups package, announced at Anthropic's SF Tech Week event, bundles a year of the Claude Team plan with up to five premium seats, $1,000 in API credits, access to the Claude Marketplace for distributing plug-ins, and virtual office hours with the Applied AI team. Eligibility is broad: any company founded in the last five years or that raised money in the last two can apply through the program page. The move follows OpenAI's DevDay push into startup distribution, with its marketplace and Sign in with ChatGPT, and comes a day after reports that Meta and Microsoft cut internal Claude Code use in favour of in-house agents. Anthropic framed the program around the idea that AI's benefits reach most people through companies building on models rather than through the models alone. For early-stage founders the credits are small, but a free Team plan for five people is worth several thousand dollars a year, and the marketplace slot is the more interesting asset: a distribution channel into Claude's paying user base that did not exist a quarter ago.