OpenAI is aggressively trying to court Anthropic’s Claude Code market with Codex, and CEO Sam Altman is leading from the front in highlighting what he believes are his rival’s missteps.
When Anthropic’s head of growth, Amol Avasare, posted a lengthy explanation on X about why the company is testing pricing changes — including removing Claude Code access from its Pro plan for a subset of new signups — Altman’s reply was two words: “ok boomer.”
The quip landed has since racked up over 144,000 views. It followed an earlier, less direct dig Altman had taken at Anthropic after OpenAI expanded Codex into a full work automation agent, where he joked publicly about not wanting to face “reduced limits or worse models” — a line widely read as a reference to Anthropic’s growing usage constraints. Altman famously does not get along well with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and the duo had refused to hold hands for an picture at India’s AI Summit earlier this year.
The Anthropic Context
Avasare’s posts laid out the bind Anthropic finds itself in candidly. When the Max plan launched a year ago, it was built for heavy chat usage. Since then, Claude Code exploded in popularity — particularly after Opus 4 — and Cowork and long-running async agents were added to the mix. The result: engagement per subscriber has surged far beyond what the subscription tiers were designed to absorb, and Anthropic is now running tests to figure out a new structure.
The specific change that prompted George Pu’s viral tweet — showing Claude Code crossed out on both Free and Pro columns — is, per Avasare, a test affecting roughly 2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers are unaffected, for now.
Avasare’s statement that subscribers would “hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit” was a reasonable promise. But that it needed to be made at all reflects how badly the optics had deteriorated before the clarification arrived.
Why Altman Is Paying Attention
Claude Code’s annualized run-rate revenue crossed $2.5 billion in February 2026, more than doubling since the start of the year, and Anthropic claimed 73% of spending among new AI tool buyers — a dramatic reversal from OpenAI’s 90% consumer market share in 2024. Claude Code is no longer a niche developer product, but a material threat to OpenAI’s developer ecosystem.
OpenAI’s response has been systematic. It cut the price of its ChatGPT Pro plan to $100/month to match Anthropic’s Max 5x tier directly, launched a standalone Codex desktop app, and is offering new Pro subscribers a promotional 10x Codex usage boost through May 31. Codex now has over 3 million weekly users, up sixfold since January.
The “ok boomer” post is therefore less idle trolling and more deliberate positioning — Altman knows Anthropic’s resource crunch is real, and every public stumble is a conversion opportunity.
Anthropic’s Underlying Problem
The strain is structural. Claude subscriptions were recently restricted from covering third-party tools like OpenClaw, with Anthropic citing the compute inefficiency of external agent harnesses compared to its own first-party products. AI coding is simply expensive — vibe-coders, enterprise engineers, and freelancers running long agentic sessions consume compute at a rate that flat subscription pricing struggles to cover.
Anthropic is not the only company grappling with this math, but it is the company currently dealing with it most publicly. The irony is not lost on observers: the company that topped the App Store earlier this year off the back of goodwill built through principled stances is now navigating a user revolt over pricing — and getting mocked by Sam Altman in the process.
Anthropic’s promise of transparency before any changes hit existing subscribers is the right instinct. Whether the eventual pricing structure holds user trust is the harder test.