Anthropic has announced that users using Claude without a subscription can now create files, use links , and access skills. It's worth noting that, until now, these features were only available to those who paid for a subscription.
The announcement comes two days after OpenAI announced that it would begin showing ads to ChatGPT users who don't pay a subscription or are on the more affordable Go plan.
See also: Anthropic says Claude will remain ad-free
Anthropic last week promised to keep Claude ad-free, likely in an attempt to attract ChatGPT users to its own AI chatbot. The new free options appear to be a continuation of its effort to target people who don't want to see ads while using a chatbot.
Anthropic Claude: New free features
Free users can create, edit, and work with files directly in a chat with Claude using Sonnet 4.5 (Pro users have access to the more capable Opus model). The chatbot is capable of creating Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDF files.
See also: Claude AI integrates Slack, Figma, and Canva into chat
Additionally, new access to connectors will allow users to connect to third-party services at no cost. There are connectors for a wide variety of apps and services, including Slack, Asana, Zapier, Stripe, Canva, Notion, Figma, and WordPress.
Finally, users will have access to Skills, which are repeatable filesystem-based resources that give Claude expertise in specific areas. Anthropic offers skills for PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and PDF, but users can create custom skills.
See also: Claude Opus 4.6: Found 500+ bugs in open-source libraries
Anthropic says that free users can also engage in longer conversations with Claude thanks to the addition of compaction to the free plan. Compaction allows the chatbot to automatically summarize previous contentso that the conversation doesn’t have to start over. However, Anthropic doesn’t appear to have increased the free plan’s limit, so free users will still face usage restrictions.
