On the morning of April 21, developers worldwide opened claude.com/pricing to find Claude Code missing from the $20/month Pro plan. No announcement, no grace period. Developer George Pu's screenshot quickly went viral.
Anthropic's growth head Amol Avasare later called it a small A/B test targeting 2% of new prosumer signups. Yet the global pricing page, documentation, and support article titles were all changed to reflect 'Using Claude Code with your Max plan,' effectively removing Pro access. Hours later, Anthropic reversed the change, calling it a mistake. The damage was done.
Trust Shatters: From Confusion to Cancellations
Pro costs $20/month; Max costs $100/month. Removing Claude Code from Pro meant a 5× cost hike for developers. Django co-creator Simon Willison described the rollout as 'confusing.' A top Hacker News comment read: 'I subscribed to Pro for Claude Code. If they can change pricing without notice, what will they change next week? That alone is enough for me to switch to Codex.'
On Reddit, r/Anthropic, r/ClaudeAI, and r/LocalLLaMA saw over 400 threads in 24 hours. 'Should I cancel my Pro renewal?' 'What is Anthropic doing?' 'This pricing change is worse than last year's 20% hike.' More than half of the replies recommended canceling and moving to Codex. Developers used terms like 'bait and switch' and 'greedy.' The Register summarized: 'Anthropic tests how devs react to yanking Claude Code from Pro plan'—the answer was mass cancellations and reputational damage.
OpenAI Strikes Back: Codex Stays Affordable
OpenAI took the opposite approach. CEO Sam Altman posted on X: 'Codex will not be removed from cheaper plans.' ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) users keep full access; Free users get a limited version. On April 8, Altman said Codex hit 3 million weekly active users. On April 22—the same day Anthropic rolled back its A/B test—OpenAI announced 4 million weekly active users, a gain of 1 million in two weeks. The Wall Street Journal called it an 'explosion.' OpenAI also launched Codex Labs to expand enterprise consulting partnerships.
The two strategies reflect different bets: Anthropic sees Claude Code's GPU costs exceeding $20 subscription margins; OpenAI treats Codex as a traffic magnet, willing to lose GPU money short-term to lock in 100M+ paying users long-term.
Beyond Price: Model Dominance
OpenAI has spent the past six weeks pushing Codex from a 'cheap alternative' to a model leader. Its March GPT-5.4 scored 75% on the OSWorld desktop automation benchmark, surpassing the human baseline of 72.4%—the first clean win. Claude Opus 4.6 had only managed 72.7% in February. GPT-5.4 opened a clear 2.6-point gap. The April ChatGPT Images 2.0 (powered by GPT-Image-2) scored 1,512 points on the Text-to-Image Arena, beating second-place Nano Banana 2 (1,271 points) by 241 points, the largest lead ever in the Arena. It swept all seven subcategories.
Within a week, a single quote dominated X, Reddit, and Hacker News: 'Anthropic is actively helping OpenAI harvest users for free.' Posted by an anonymous AI product engineer and retweeted over 4,000 times, it appeared under Codex onboarding screenshots, Claude Code cancellation confirmations, and 'I switched' threads. OpenAI's best ad campaign this quarter wasn't paid for—it was gifted by a competitor.