Claude Team Plan

The Claude Team Plan is a plan that lets people at organizations like research labs or universities use Claude together. It's similar to a company buying office software for its employees as a group, except here the group is scientists, and the price has been cut dramatically.

Standard seats are given for free, and premium seats, which come with much higher usage limits, are offered at a steep discount off the regular price for a year. That said, not just anyone can sign up: a principal investigator whose academic or research institution has been verified must register first, and only then can the members of their lab join in.

Researchers spend a lot of time reading through mountains of papers and analyzing data, and if the daily usage limit is too low, they hit a wall quickly. The fact that Anthropic boosted usage limits for premium seats and discounted them so heavily is really an acknowledgment that free seats alone aren't enough to handle real research work.

In the article, Anthropic announces that it is opening Claude to 10,000 scientists today through the Claude Team Plan. The word "free" makes it easy to assume everything is at no cost, but the premium seats, with usage limits raised to levels actually needed for research, cost $15 a month separately (an 80% discount), and even that can only be requested through a principal investigator who has passed academic institution verification.

First check whether your organization qualifies as an academic or nonprofit institution. If you're eligible as a principal investigator (PI), go through the institutional verification process on Claude's scientist Team Plan application page. Once verification is complete, you can invite additional lab members to share the account.