Folks saying this offer is in bad faith or not generous enough dont seem to understand how low the bar is here for rewarding maintainers.

I maintain Express.js and Lodash, as well as a number of express direct deps (as a TC member of both Express and Lodash).

OSS has been my fulltime focus for over a year (aka Im unemployed). In 2025 I made $10 from open source, in the form of an amazon gift card for fixing a bug in another random open source project (I think they have VC money).

Call it skill issue on my part, sure valid. But having a form that says “give us your email and handle, we can easily verify your contributions, and in exchange you get $200/month of value and we ask nothing of you” is the most generous gift Ive seen.

Is it enough to fix the well known power dynamics of OSS? Of course not. Is it cheap PR for Anthropic? Yes, as is every other corporate OSS fund initiative. Im not going to give them a standing ovation and a key to the city bc they cleared the extremely low bar.

My point is that, regardless of motives, from this maintainer’s perspective this is a kind offer which is respectful of me and my time. If you fall into the camp that training on OSS is stealing, I can see why youd think that this is a slap in the face. I personally do not see it that way, as my work is a conduit for me to serve millions Ill never meet, and what they do with my labor is not a personal concern. I do what I do because the process itself has value to me.

At first I thought people here were being pretty unsympathetic to an early version of a beneficial program. I could see a company setting a 6-month timeline initially, so they can reevaluate the program and choose how to evolve their support for open source. I expected to see something along the lines of, "at the end of the 6 months we'll evaluate whether to continue your free plan."

But no, they're quite explicit about this being nothing more than a way to try to get paid subscriptions from open source maintainers:

> Your complimentary subscription will expire at the end of the Benefit Period. After expiration, any existing subscription will continue unless you cancel. You may independently choose to purchase a paid Claude subscription at the then-current price through Anthropic’s standard signup process.

So anyone who participates in this will need to remember to opt out six months from now, or suddenly find themselves with invoices at the max 20x level.

That's pretty ugly.

Edit: I believe I misread the terms. As mwigdahl points out below: "If you have an existing subscription, it pauses while the free period is active. After that free period, your existing subscription resumes. As I read it, there is no "auto-subscribe" after the free period ends -- you just revert back to whatever you had before (or nothing, if you weren't a subscriber before)."

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms

> You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads.

I've been an open source maintainer of one of the biggest open source projects in the world[1], and it wouldn't fill any of these requirements. Anybody else hates it that now "open source" is conflated with Github (a private company, itself not open source) popularity?

[1]: https://www.openstack.org/

Considering they trained their model on open-source software, the least they could do is give it to open-source maintainers for free with no time limit. I’m sure they can come up with other ways to prevent abuse. This 6-months-free move just adds insult to injury, like it’s just a move to extract more from those who involuntarily contributed to the training already. And that’s coming from me, a Claude Code fan.

I like what GitHub and Jetbrains are doing, where you get Copilot and PyCharm for free as long as you're a maintainer. They keep renewing my license.

A 6-month trial isn't showing appreciation for OSS any more than "first crack hit's free" is showing appreciation for what a good person you are. It's just "you look like a promising customer".

Anthropic’s models have almost certainly gorged on an enormous amount of OSS, and if they think they can settle that debt with only six months of perks for the maintainers who’ve kept that ecosystem alive, it comes across as pretty arrogant.

It's weird to make it 6 months only because it sends a message of, "Thank you for dedicating 5-10+ years building up a very popular open source project. In return we believe this is worth exactly $1,200 (6 x $200) in credits". Especially since they are scraping all of our work and profiting from it directly without acknowledgement or compensation -- past, present and future indefinitely.

> Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

How many total developers does that cover? 100? How many of them aren't already corporate employees?

And also

> 6 months of free Claude Max 20x

So basically a free trial.

When Github Copilot first launched they gave Pro subscriptions to everyone that regularly committed to a public repo, regardless of the number of stars or downloads, and kept renewing it indefinitely. I don't know if that program is still around but it was amazing to get to try out some early LLM coding tools for open source development.

It seems to me that they genuinely are trying to do a good thing. Giving away $200 subs probably will cost more than what they will earn from continued subscriptions, given that the top library authors have an extremely low chance of being gullible consumers who forget to cancel their free trials. They could be aiming for other benefits as well such as generally improving the open-source tools that they depend on as well as getting some well-respected people to talk about how good Claude is, but if they even think that far ahead that's pretty reasonable and commendable behavior.

But it's funny how their methods end up appearing so close to the loss-leader tactics that everyone (including themselves with the double holiday Opus limits and $50 extra usage) is doling out to ultimately selfishly make more money.

They do require that you allow them to use your name publicly.

They are silent on whether you can prohibit them from training on your input, so I assume you can.

My guess is, if even 10% of maintainers forget to disable training, then Anthropic will have a most excellent source of how really good developers approach problems that can be fed back into the model. That could improve things for everyone.

Of course, the whole purpose of a trial is to induce dependence on the service. Let’s hope that doesn’t reduce the skill of those maintainers. If open source code gets better as a result, that’s good for all.

AI is somewhat helpful but I'm not interested in a company finding a way for me to pay to do my volunteer OSS work. GitHub Copilot offers a permanent free subscription for OSS maintainers.

I previously ignored a free offer when Claude reached out to me as an open source maintainer as it was a glorified free trial. I hope this one continues beyond the listed 6 months, I am not interested in a glorified free trial and if it requires entering credit card details I won't be signing up.

Made a mistake reading this thread on Safari where I don't have the usual suspects blocked. Some guy read that this converts to paid and then a bunch of people just kept repeating it. A real lesson in how many people are simply repeating things without knowing anything.

Open source developers should be paid for their efforts, and for their contributions to LLM models, past, present, and future, rather than be enticed into paying to participate six months down the road.

>Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

pour one out for us gitlab users :(

Sorry we stole all your src code that you labored over for hours and hours of your life. Here’s a few bucks for 6 months to help train our model even more.

I get Copilot for free as an open source maintainer and it's nice. But right now I am also paying for two Claude Max ($200/mo) for my own projects. Would be nice to have one of them covered for at least 6 months! Hope Anthropic accepts my application because I do not track downloads at all.

For 6 months? So it's just a fancy, "first one is free" trial?

I really appreciate the gesture, but this kind of feels like it’s an attempt to claw (lol) some good will back from devs. The barrier is way too high, imo. And the 6 month cap does make sense given the cost of LLMs but it’s a bad feeling. We like you, but for 6 months.

As a tinnnyy plug, I’ve ran OSS sponsorship programs before for companies. One thing that I always hated was the sales contact process to get it. So, for Vizzly I made it 100% automated. Sign up, connect an OSS public repo, get a free plan. https://vizzly.dev/open-source/ I don’t wanna talk to you and you don’t wanna talk to me (for this :p)

Essentially they want you to use it for 6 months and then hook you up to their paid offerings. Smart

5000 stars. That's an interesting threshold. I've checked and astropy -- the main python module used by pretty much every python user in astrophysics has 5100 stars. I would guess almost no open source code in science would pass the threshold.

EDIT: Just another test, one of the most used codes in astro -- an ensemble Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo sampler https://github.com/dfm/emcee has 1600 stars. It just shows the 5000 stars is a bit PR, rather than a serious attempt to help open source.

I may sound unthankful here, but it just very strongly smells of Antropic amping up their PR campaigning lately, even the headline on the post reads offputting.

Plus, while 6 months is better than 1 month, why isn't it a recurring deal (or token-limited), which renews after check-ins (like educational discounts do). This sounds like an Apple TV+ offer you get for every Apple product you buy. A hook, more than a treat.

In this case, I guess it's just a slimy approach to building a self-selected lead list of people you can hard-hit with upsells after the 6 months.

Thank you for everything you ship*

*there's a 6 months limit we have on gratitute.

"Contact the sales"

No, thanks. I decided I don't want to play those games. I get MiniMax unlimited for 10$ per month, and free GitHub Copilot as an open source maintainer and contributor.

I don't need to beg to get some free stuff, only to later realize the only way to use it is through the shitty Claude Code.

"or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads"

Right, because Node is the only package ecosystem.

Scraping data, well that's just okay...

What if we get proven code some other way?

Give our tools for free to prove their worth

No one will guess this is astroturf

A special program, with a special account

To get labeled data worth a big amount

Now suddenly everyone's gonna become a 'maintainer'. People are gonna abuse it and just use it for everything else BUT proper(not fake and AI GENERATED) open source projects.

Sad day. I hope so they are gonna change the TOS and punish anyone with a 1 million $ fine if someone lies.

That's the only way: criminal charges for students using AI(when forbidden such as academia) and people who plan to abuse it (stealing tokens against TOS).

it's impossible to compete with cheaters and with cheaters who stole money

So open source contributors are not eligible? I know it's kind of petty to look at free stuff and go "but what about me?" But I got excited for no reason.

I'm kind of sceptical about the altruistic motives here. Giving this to open source maintainers also solves the problem of identifying high quality feedback/rewards for their rlvr models. With everybody using Claude code it might be difficult for them to find a robust way to tell apart good reward signal from mediocre or below average feedback.

"free as in cocaine", for 6 months.

Gotta boost up those user numbers before dumping the stock in an IPO, I'd respect it more if it wasn't what every other tech IPO has done over the previous decade.

I wonder how much of this is in response to the MJ Rathbun debacle.

Lo, behold how the beast doth roar! From the depths thereof it crieth aloud, saying, “Feed me.”

Sincerely,

Sales & Marketing

I'll take it! I've been using Opus 4.6 with GitHub Tasks sparingly but any sort of continued usage is very expensive. This would be handy, like 10x my efforts.

Kind of strange that it's only for npm?

Anthropic, your model and marketing teams do great work, but your business leadership keeps making decisions that make you look pretty bad.

Is this what it feels like to be slapped by an LLM?

"It's a trap!"

–Ackbar, open source software maintainer

If you appreciate open source maintainers, detect when users are opening pull requests without human review and stop them. Feel free to keep burning their tokens, just stop making pull requests.

Hey that seems pretty cool! No doubt it's gonna be a way to either collect more info of successful devs or maybe just upsell stuff after those 6 months are over, but it's something!

I went for their 100 USD paid tier and it's honestly been immensely useful (Claude Code with the desktop UI with multiple parallel tasks), I've done more and with better quality in the past few weeks than others do in a month - maybe I just got lucky with the domain but it really is a force multiplier and I'm working on like 4 projects in parallel at work and am crushing it, being overworked aside.

Finally I also have enough capacity for various side projects and utility tools/scripts, or at least I will until I burn out, but that's not really the fault of the tool, rather the amount of work.

Being able to throw the latest Opus model at every problem is also really, really nice. Way better than any of the slop before.

The first taste is free, eh

I can't believe that people can't simply accept gifts.

That's nice.

It also makes sense to give tools for open source developers. Sometimes we need to test compatibility (does my repo play nice with that harness/ide/etc?). This in turn makes that repo be more solid for the paid tool, which is a potential way of attracting users for both. It has been done by others (like JetBrains IDEs).

Has Claude become slow and buggy for other users?

They will need CC in order to deal with the slop that is constantly thrown at their repos.

why is only the JavaScript package system eligible?

The cynicism here is crazy. You can get a lot done in 6 months and prices will probably have dropped by then due to competition. There's no lock-in keeping you from switching coding agents if you're not stupid about it.

There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of limited offers.

> Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

Laughable.

This is a tiny, if even unimportant, fraction of the FOSS community that runs the modern tech stack.

5000+ stars proves this is a sales tactic

Don’t worry so much man, give it a try, the first few are on me, give you time to get comfortable /S

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[dead]

5000 stars required? And six months only? What a misleading multilevel clickait scam. But I knew that everything about Anthropic is a scam, from the excessive token usage to the model quality reduction to the various user-hostile actions.

No, thank you.

No thanks, projects are too important for slop. And why would I want to be tracked so you can see my thought process, stupid questions etc.? Will you sell that information later?

Your CEO has bragged multiple times how your tool will make me unemployed. Why would I participate in that?

You stole my code without attribution. Why should I use the services of a copyright infringer?

at close to 120 stars within 2 weeks from launch, i hope i make it there!

Now suddenly everyone's gonna become a 'maintainer'. People are gonna abuse it and just use it for everything else BUT proper(not fake and AI GENERATED) open source projects.

Sad day. I hope so they are gonna change the TOS and punish anyone with a 1 million $ fine if someone lies.

That's the only way: criminal charges for students using AI(when forbidden such as academia) and people who plan to abuse it (stealing tokens against TOS).

it's impossible to compete with cheaters and with cheaters who stole moneyl