No Ads, No Paywall: Anthropic’s Bold “Sonnet 4.5” Gambit to Dethrone ChatGPT

Anthropic expanded its Claude Free tier, bringing premium features like file creation across Office formats, connectors to services such as Slack, Notion, Canva, Zapier, and PayPal, and user-defined skills to non-paying users, all powered by the Sonnet 4.5 model and with no ads. The move, timed alongside OpenAI’s plan to add advertisements to ChatGPT’s free tier, aims to win market share with longer conversations, richer multimodal interactions, and an ad-free experience, though questions remain about the sustainability of inference costs.