Anthropic announced on September 23 that Claude Code's cloud sessions have exited research preview and are now generally available. Developers can kick off a task in the cloud, close their laptop, and Claude Code keeps working in an Anthropic-hosted environment — they can check back in from any device later to see the results or redirect the work.
To promote the feature, existing subscribers can claim a one-time credit: $100 for Pro users, $250 for Max users. The claim window closes October 7; users can run /claim-credit in the command line or use the official link.
How it works
Cloud sessions have four entry points: the web at claude.ai/code, the Code tab in the Claude mobile app, the desktop app, and the claude --cloud command in the terminal. You need to connect a GitHub account before starting.
According to reports, each cloud session checks out its own copy of the repository and works on a separate branch, so multiple sessions can run in parallel. If two sessions touch the same file, merging them can still produce Git conflicts — no different from a human running several branches at once. Beyond Anthropic's default hosted environment, enterprise users can also self-host through partners such as Coder, though the official announcement hasn't spelled out exactly what that support covers.
It's best suited to long-running work: large-scale refactors, migrations, dependency upgrades, and repeated test runs. Those tasks used to require keeping the originating machine powered on the whole time — now they don't.
How the credit gets spent
After the announcement, plenty of users assumed cloud sessions would cost extra. Anthropic's developer account then stepped in to clarify:
"Cloud sessions run on your Pro or Max plan, like the rest of Claude Code. This promo is an optional one-time credit that your cloud sessions spend first, before falling back onto your normal plan usage."
In other words, cloud sessions aren't billed on their own — the credit is simply an extra buffer layered on top of your plan usage.
Doing the math
Per Anthropic's official pricing, Pro costs $20 a month (or $17 a month billed annually), while Max starts at $100 a month, split into 5x and 20x usage tiers.
Rough math puts the $100 Pro credit at roughly five months' worth of the Pro subscription, and the $250 Max credit at about two and a half months of the $100 tier. The credit is denominated in dollars — how much cloud runtime that buys depends on which model a task uses and how many tokens it burns, and Anthropic hasn't published a conversion rate.
The math is interesting from Anthropic's side too. Cloud sessions run on its own compute, and tasks keep going after a user closes their laptop, so a single session's duration and token consumption are likely higher than local, interactive use. Back in April, Anthropic tested pulling Claude Code out of the $20 Pro plan for a small slice of new users; its head of growth explained at the time that usage varied too widely for the existing plan to handle, and the test was reversed in under a day.
This time, it chose to fold cloud capability into the existing plans and use a one-time credit to pull users into trying it. Once the claim window ends and the credit runs out, how many long-running tasks the Pro tier's five-hour usage cap can absorb will be what users feel most directly.
Sources: Anthropic's official developer account, Claude's official pricing page, CocoLoop, AlphaSignal; credit amounts and claim deadlines follow Anthropic's announcement, and plan prices follow the official pricing page's dollar figures.