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Anthropic's Claude Gets More Free Features as OpenAI Starts Showing Ads in ChatGPT

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Anthropic today said that customers who use Claude without a subscription can create files, use connectors, and access skills, all of which are features that used to require a paid plan.

anthopic-claude.jpg

The announcement comes two days after OpenAI said that it was starting to roll out ads for ChatGPT users who don't have a paid subscription, or who use the most affordable Go plan.

Anthropic last week promised to keep Claude ad-free, potentially luring ChatGPT users to Claude. The new free options appear to be a continuation of its effort to target people who don't want to see ads when using a chatbot.

Free users can create, edit, and work with files directly in a Claude conversation using Sonnet 4.5 (Pro users have access to the more capable Opus model). Claude is able to generate Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDF files.

The new access to connectors will let Claude users connect to third-party services at no cost. There are connectors for a wide variety of apps and services, including Slack, Asana, Zapier, Stripe, Canva, Notion, Figma, and WordPress.

Skills are repeatable filesystem-based resources that give Claude domain-specific expertise. Anthropic offers PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and PDF skills, but users can create custom skills with their domain expertise and organizational knowledge.

Anthropic says that free users are also able to engage in longer conversations with Claude thanks to the addition of compaction to the free plan. Compaction allows Claude to automatically summarize earlier context so there isn't a need to start a conversation from the beginning. Anthropic does not appear to have increased the free tier cap, however, so free users will still run into usage limitations.

Article Link: Anthropic's Claude Gets More Free Features as OpenAI Starts Showing Ads in ChatGPT
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/11/anthropic-claude-more-free-features/
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Interesting move by Anthropic. Keeping Claude ad-free while expanding free features like file generation, connectors, and longer conversations definitely makes it more appealing to cost-conscious users. If the usage caps stay tight though, that could still limit how competitive it really is against ChatGPT’s free tier.
 
I think everyone will eventually be serving ads on the free side (hell, maybe even the paid tiers someday), but Anthropic is smart to boil the frog more slowly when there's so little differentiation in the market otherwise.
 
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MacRumors said:
… so free users will still run into usage limitations.
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This should really go without saying. Oh but yes, forgive me, we have to cater to those readers who think everything they want to use and download online (music, movies, apps, AI) should be free.

CapitalIdea said:
I still chuckle at billionaire Sam Altman trying to claim Anthropic is for “rich people.” It’s as pathetic as when Zuckerberg was claiming that Apple letting users opt out of being tracked across apps was an attack on small business owners.
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In context, he was firing back at Anthropic's recent ads, which certainly implied that advertising was about to infiltrate ChatGPT's responses to user questions. As much as I enjoyed the ads, it was certainly no surprise that this was going to trigger Sam’s anger—so I would argue that his response was not nearly as pathetic as Zuckerberg’s purely greed-motivated response to Apple. Nonetheless, let those ads stay there as a constant reminder to every AI company (including Anthropic) not to go down that dark path!
 
I’ve been going back and forth between these two for a while now, and ChatGPT is just superior when it comes to coding. I know that’s opposite of what people say on social media, but in my experience, ChatGPT is more clear, more comprehensive, and ultimately more helpful.

Claude is terse, misses the point sometimes, and requires a lot of additional prompting.

But I also code in C++ primarily so there’s the strong possibility that one is trained better than the other for certain languages.

If ads start creeping in, maybe it’ll bother me, but it has to be enough to tip the scales towards a less helpful option.
 
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can they add email + password login option for those of us with multiple devices / sessions , where iCloud keychain / password managers would allow seamless logging in from whatever session / mode we are using.
 
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Adoniram said:
I’ve been going back and forth between these two for a while now, and ChatGPT is just superior when it comes to coding.
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My experience has been the opposite. I’ve tried ChatGPT, Gemini and now Claude, and although it’s early days with Claude, it seems to be outperforming the others so far.

It has to be said that they’re all far from perfect. I don’t know how people with no coding experience fare, because in my experience you have to steer them in the right direction and call out their misguided approaches sometimes.
 
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Great, so now...
Claude is ad-free but limits are absurdly low and paid tier is expensive.
ChatGPT GO is cheap but with ads
Gemini is cheap but just sucks in term of UI, no standalone app for Mac etc.
Is there an alternative to that? I was happy with ChatGPT GO but ads are a no-go.
 
free or not. let’s not burn more resources to validate the spellcheck bot that agrees with you. also let’s bet all the money that it will never ever fail. great idea.
 
kalsta said:
My experience has been the opposite. I’ve tried ChatGPT, Gemini and now Claude, and although it’s early days with Claude, it seems to be outperforming the others so far.

It has to be said that they’re all far from perfect. I don’t know how people with no coding experience fare, because in my experience you have to steer them in the right direction and call out their misguided approaches sometimes.
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Echoing this sentiment.

Wanted Claude to do some dynamically number some zones on a graphic that changes when I rotate that graphic, it didn't do exactly what I wanted and coordinates are still messed up. I sat on it to think about how to tackle it. Then a few days later after describing a hard-code way of assigning the numbers to zones, things, then it understood what I meant and then proceeds to do it dynamically.

Also hope they don't spiral. The free lower usage limit can be a tiny bit annoying, but I'm not in a rush so that's still fine.
 
Not sure why Claude / ChatGPT / Gemini are even thinking and acting so adversarial — there is room for all three. They all have pros and cons based on how each users interface with them.
 
svish said:
Great to see this. Very good move. Hopefully Anthropic will now increase usage limits of the free plan in the near future.
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Why would they?

If you find it useful enough that you keep running out of free usage - pay $20 for it.

That’s how businesses worked before we found bad hidden ways to monetize free users.
 
I finally downloaded Claude to test. Right in the first interaction, it was a disappointment. I asked him to remember something in his persistent memory from conversation to conversation. And he answered me that he doesn't have that capacity. This is something that is very useful in ChatGPT.
 
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