Anthropic on Wednesday expanded Claude's free tier to include file creation, third-party connectors, and skills, features that until now required a paid plan. The timing, two days after OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT for free and Go-tier users, is not subtle. Anthropic's announcement ended with the tagline: "No ads in sight."
What free users actually get
File creation is the headline feature. Free Claude users can now generate and edit Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDFs directly in conversation. Sonnet 4.5 powers the file generation; paid subscribers still get the more capable Opus model.
Connectors are the second addition, and the list of supported third-party services is longer than you might expect for a free product: Slack, Asana, Zapier, Stripe, Canva, Notion, Figma, WordPress, and PayPal all made the cut. These let Claude pull data from and push actions to external apps, which is the kind of functionality that most competitors reserve for enterprise plans.
Then there are skills, which are a bit harder to pin down. They're filesystem-based instruction sets that give Claude repeatable expertise in specific domains. Anthropic ships default skills for Office file types and PDFs. Users can also build custom ones using their own workflows and organizational knowledge, which is where things get interesting for small teams trying to standardize how they use the chatbot.
The conversation length problem (sort of solved)
Anthropic also added compaction to the free tier. In practice, Claude now auto-summarizes earlier parts of a conversation when it approaches the context limit, so chats can run longer without hitting a wall. It's a meaningful quality-of-life fix, though "longer conversations" doesn't mean "unlimited." The underlying usage cap hasn't changed, and MacRumors noted that free users will still bump into rate limits, possibly after just a few messages.
That's the catch nobody at Anthropic is eager to highlight. The feature list looks generous, but the usage ceiling is still the same. You can create a spreadsheet and connect to Notion and teach Claude a custom skill, right up until the free tier throttles you. Whether these features matter depends entirely on how much you can accomplish before that happens.
Why now? Because ChatGPT has ads now.
The strategic context here is hard to miss. OpenAI started testing sponsored content in ChatGPT on February 9, showing ads at the bottom of responses for free and $8/month Go subscribers. The move had been announced in January, and Anthropic has been milking the contrast ever since.
A week before this free tier update, Anthropic published a blog post titled "Claude is a space to think," pledging to keep Claude ad-free. The company argued that AI conversations are too personal and too sensitive for commercial interruption, a position that's easy to hold when your revenue comes from enterprise contracts rather than 800 million weekly active free users.
Anthropic then ran Super Bowl ads mocking the concept of ads in AI chatbots, which reportedly cost around $8 million. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the campaign "clearly dishonest," pointing out that OpenAI's ad format is clearly labeled and separated from responses. He also noted that ChatGPT has more free users in Texas alone than Claude has across the entire US, which, if accurate, explains why the two companies can afford such different business models.
Anthropic did leave itself an out in the blog post: "Should we need to revisit this approach, we'll be transparent about our reasons for doing so." So ad-free forever might mean ad-free for now.
Does the math work?
Giving away more features for free while your competitor starts monetizing free users with ads is a bold bet. Anthropic claims Claude Code and Cowork generate at least $1 billion in annualized enterprise revenue, which would explain how the company can afford generosity on the consumer side. But enterprise revenue subsidizing free consumer features is a model that works until it doesn't, and the AI compute bill isn't getting cheaper.
Free tier users who hit the usage cap can upgrade to Pro at $20/month for five times the capacity and access to Opus 4.6. Max plans run $100 or $200/month. The free tier expansion looks less like charity and more like an extended trial funnel: let people build workflows around connectors and skills, then wait for them to hit the ceiling.
The update is live now. European and global availability mirrors US access. Anthropic has not announced any plans to increase the free tier's usage limits.
