Claude Pricing Accessibility for India Discussed

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Anthropic is localizing Claude's pricing in India, which is its second largest market. Interesting because people there will be able to get it cheaper than people in America or other countries that make more money historically. Apple's OpenAI complaint, they're detailing a show and tell interviewing over 400 hires, claiming that OpenAI is copying trade secrets.
World models right now are getting billions, and Lacan, Li and Runway are all betting against LLMs. We're going to get into the disparity there. Meta is doubling their Hyperion data center to 5 gigawatts. It was going to be 2.5, or I thought it was maybe 2 at the beginning, but they're pushing the spending past $50 billion, increasing it there.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk are having a ton of beef, which is kind of funny. We'll end the show on that.
Sam Altman is saying that Elon Musk's space data centers are a short-term sales pitch, and Elon Musk is calling him scam Altman. So there's lots to get into. Ever since Fable 5 came back to Claude, Anthropix has been playing this weird game where they keep saying they have a new deadline for when Claude Fable 5 is going to get pulled off of the subscription tiers, and you'll only be able to access it through the API. Initially, they extended it till the 12th, and or I think the 7th was like the first deadline. They're like, it's going to be off after the 7th. And I remember using up all my tokens till the 7th. And then they said, look, we're resetting it, and you actually can use it till the 12th, which was yesterday. And so I used up all my tokens again on the 12th, and my tokens don't reset on Claude till like Wednesday. So now I literally have no more Claude tokens, can't Claude for like three days on two separate Claude Max accounts, mind you. And then what happened 20 hours ago, Claude came up with a tweet and said, we're extending Claude Fable 5 access to all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude codes weekly rate limits to 50% higher through July 19th. This is the second, third time, second time that they've extended this.
It's super annoying. I replied to them on Twitter and said, except I already used up all my tokens in anticipation of the deadline, so I have no more credits left. Thanks for nothing. The sentiment seems to be felt by everyone. If you look at Omasar over on X, he said, I don't think Anthropic realizes how disruptive these changes are to users. I appreciate the extension, but please stop playing games. Either keep it under the subscription or put it under the API already. I 100% agree. This is super annoying because you obviously, when someone makes a rule or says that there's a deadline, you're gonna plan accordingly, aka use up your tokens ahead of time. Would I have been more frugal? Would I have spent them better? You know, if they had been there for two weeks? Yes, obviously. So now I'm in a pickle. And lucky for me and for anyone else that might have had an occasion where you ran out, you hit some sort of subscription limit, token limit, I would love for you to check out my platform, aibox.ai, because when you reach a token limit on OpenAI or Claude or any other platform, aibox.ai for $8.99 a month, you get access to over 80 different AI models, and it's going to hold you over till your next hit of tokens comes back in from Claude. In addition, to be honest, you get access to image, audio, video, music, text, AI. So if you just want to have access to every single AI model anytime that you need it, go check out aibox.ai, I'll leave a link in the description. In other news for Anthropic, they are now selling Claude in Indian rupees, and they're pricing Claude Pro at 2000 rupees, that's about $21 a month, and their most powerful model Claude Max at $125 a month American, or about 12,000 rupees. India accounts for about 5.8% of Claude's global usage, so it makes them basically the second most popular market after the United States, but they can't accept UPI, which is India's dominant payment method. So this makes it tricky, but what's really interesting is a lot of people thought, and I kind of mentioned in the intro of the podcast, that when you localize, you typically will make it cheaper in the country by based off of what the income is of that country. So if India makes less money, you would make the product cheaper in India. This is what a lot of SaaS subscriptions do, and in this case, they did not do that. Anthropic is not heavily discounting the model for people in India, and in fact, it's actually more expensive, because in the United States, the pro plan of Claude is $20 a month, and it's roughly, the conversion rate bounces around, but it's roughly $21 if you're doing the conversion from Indian Rupees right now. OpenAI added UPI support when they launched rupee pricing in August of last year, and Anthropic is still requiring credit cards or Apple or Google billing. It's a really big friction point in a market where UPI is basically the default checkout method in India. Anthropic opened a office in February of 2026 in India, and they signed some partnerships with Infosys and Tata Consulting Services to try to help reach Indian enterprises, but they're being criticized because they currently cost more than if you had tried to get the same service in the United States. Apple is filing a 41-page lawsuit alleging that OpenAI has systematically recruited over 400 Apple employees and extracted confidential hardware secrets from them, including by coaching candidates to bring actual device parts to job interviews and helping one engineer allegedly breach Apple's cloud storage after he left. The case that they're making right now is targeting OpenAI, their hardware subsidiary IO which Apple acquired for $6.5 billion and three current OpenAI executives. And if you guys remember, they have this huge deal going on right now with Johnny Ive, who formerly helped design the iPhone over at Apple and OpenAI is working on a device with him, so Apple is not happy about this. Tang Tan, who's OpenAI's chief hardware officer and a 24-year Apple veteran, allegedly instructed job candidates to bring confidential parts like batteries and logic boards to show-and-tell interview sessions. Former Apple engineer Chang Liu downloaded dozens of confidential files weeks after leaving in January of 2026 by exploiting an authentication vulnerability and then texting a colleague, I still have another computer. Apple said that it first contacted OpenAI about the alleged misconduct in February and received no response before they filed this lawsuit. OpenAI's hardware device is expected to launch next year.