Anthropic announced an expansion of its Claude for Startups program as part of its SF Tech Week event on October 6. Eligible companies get a free year of Claude Team with up to five premium seats, plus $1,000 in API credits, along with access to the Claude Marketplace for building plug-ins and virtual office hours with Anthropic's Applied AI team.

Eligibility is deliberately loose: companies founded in the last five years or funded in the last two years can apply. Anthropic framed the move around its belief that AI's benefits will reach most people through the companies that build on top of models, rather than through the models alone.

The program expansion is a practical subsidy for early-stage teams building on Claude, and it lands amid Anthropic's broader developer push: the same week also brought Claude Haiku 5.5 with deep price cuts and a halved Sonnet 5.5 cache-read price for agentic workloads.