Anthropic Separates Programmatic Claude Usage Into Metered Credit Pool Effective June 15 — Up to 175× Price Increase for Heavy Agent SDK Users

Starting June 15, Anthropic splits Claude subscriptions into two pools: interactive chat (unchanged) and a new metered credit pool for programmatic use via the Agent SDK, claude -p, Claude Code GitHub Actions, and third-party agent frameworks. Credits are $20 for Pro, $100 for Max 5x, and $200 for Max 20x, billed at full API list rates with no rollover — replacing what was effectively a 15–30× subsidized rate. Heavy agentic workloads face effective price increases of 12–175×, and users must claim credits via email and opt into overflow billing before the June 15 deadline or have requests hard-stopped when the credit pool exhausts.