Free Claude Team seats for 10,000 scientists

Anthropic is opening Claude to 10,000 scientists at academic and nonprofit research institutions at no cost to start, with verified principal investigators qualifying for a Claude Team subscription and free Standard seats for their group. The terms, prices and eligibility rules are set out on Claude's program page.

At a glance

• Eligibility runs through verified principal investigators at accredited universities and nonprofit research institutes working in the natural sciences, mathematics, computer science, engineering and related fields; industry R&D teams are excluded.
• Standard seats cost $0 a month against a regular $20, Premium seats $15 against $100 with 5x more usage, and a single group can hold between one and 25 seats.
• Anthropic says it does not train on conversations, uploaded files or research data, and admins can configure retention policies, covering unpublished findings, grant drafts and proprietary datasets.

The offer reads as a distribution play as much as a research subsidy: academic labs are where tooling habits form, and a group that builds its analysis pipelines around Claude Code during a free year is unlikely to rebuild them elsewhere in the second. The 12-month window and the 90-day inactivity clause point the same way, toward converting active labs rather than parking seats. Pricing after the promotional period is left open.

Standard seats run at $0 a month against a regular $20

Verified principal investigators qualify for a Claude Team subscription plan and can then add their research group on Standard seats, which are free against a regular $20 a month, or Premium seats at $15 against $100. Premium carries 5x more usage and higher limits for long-running analyses.

The promotional pricing runs for 12 months from sign-up, or from Thursday, August 27, 2026, and Anthropic says the offer is limited to a set number of groups. A group can hold between one and 25 seats, with a minimum purchase of one; larger groups are told to contact the company.

Annual billing is available at $0 or $180 per seat. After the 12 months, seats renew at the then-current price for the plan, and Anthropic says admins will be notified before that happens. Prices exclude applicable tax and may change at Anthropic's discretion.

The plan bundles Claude Science, Code and Cowork with connectors to research databases

The plan includes everything in Claude Team: shared projects, Claude Science, Code and Cowork, file creation, built-in connectors to research databases, single sign-on, and central billing and administration. Anthropic describes Claude Science as a workbench that runs analyses, searches databases and traces steps from data wrangling to publication.

The published use cases span six fields: combining ultraviolet observations from different space telescopes into a full-sky map; end-to-end analysis of scRNA, WGS, ATAC and mass-spectrometry data; retrosynthesis from a drawn structure or SMILES; rewriting and verifying fault-tolerant quantum circuits; numerical hypothesis testing; and materials discovery from target properties.

The program page carries endorsements from researchers at Rutgers, MIT, the Whitehead Institute, the University of Zurich and elsewhere. Kyle Cranmer, director of the Data Science Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says Claude Code let him connect a theoretical particle physics problem to techniques from industrial systems engineering and number theory.

Most applications are reviewed within 5–7 business days

Applicants confirm their institutional affiliation and briefly describe their research. Most applications are reviewed within 5–7 business days, after which approved admins receive an email and can add seats right away. Eligibility covers principal investigators or equivalent at accredited universities and nonprofit research institutes.

For-profit companies, contract research organisations and industry R&D teams are pointed to Claude Team and Claude Enterprise at standard pricing. If a group records no activity for 90 days, Anthropic says it may return that group to standard Team pricing so the promotional seats go to active researchers, with an email to the admin first.

Anthropic says Claude does not train on conversations, uploaded files or research data, and that unpublished findings, grant drafts and proprietary datasets stay private. Admins can configure data retention policies for their team, and the program page states that research data stays with the group.

Extra credits through AI for Science

Groups on the plan can apply through AI for Science, Anthropic's application-based grant program, for extra usage or API credits when a project outgrows the capacity a seat provides. Applications are reviewed on merit, and Anthropic says the program has backed hundreds of projects across institutions and scientific domains so far. No figure for the total credits available has been given.