Note on Anthropic Claude AI’s license terms: consumer subscriptions disallow commercial usage

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI, recently updated they license agreement ("EULA" or "Terms of Service") and I just wanted to point out an important limitation in the so-called consumer subscriptions: commercial usage is explicitly not allowed.

Many developers I know are using for example the $20/month Pro subscription to write code, both for personal enjoyment, but also at work. However, the Claude terms of service are very explicit on this in section 11:

"Non-commercial use only. You agree that you will not use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we and our Providers have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity."

It seems that at this point, the safest way to use Claude AI in commercial, professional software development is to use the AI API directly, but that comes with a token cost. This cost can become high in daily usage.

Something to keep in mind, as it seems to me that not that many organizations have actually read through the license text in full.