❤️ Anthropic has announced that they are offering 6 months of free access to Claude Max 20x for all maintainers and core contributors of open source projects.
Criteria: you must be a maintainer or in the core team of a public repository with 5000+ stars on GitHub or 1M+ downloads per month on NPM, with activity in the last 3 months (commits, releases, reviews). However, if your project is one of those that quietly supports the entire ecosystem, Anthropic asks you to apply anyway and tell them about your project.
They are accepting up to 10,000 contributors, and applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
This is a logical step - open source developers are essentially free advertising and testing of the product in the wild. When a maintainer of a large project uses Claude in their work, thousands of contributors see it. And a satisfied maintainer is the best ambassador.
For Anthropic, this is also a way to get feedback from the most demanding users. People who write infrastructure code quickly find all the weak points of the tool. It's cheaper to give them free access than to hire as many testers.
