Who's still paying for Claude? Anthropic IPO the end of $200 Claude Max plan? & the AI tier list

Who's still paying for Claude? Will the Anthropic IPO end the $200 Claude Max plan? Cursor moved Claude to API pricing in the new X Subscription, Anthropic's growth fell from 143% to 46%, and Meta and Google hit the AI frontier. Rik and Ben Broch break it down. Rik went from cancelling Claude in August to the $200 Claude Max 20x plan this week, while OpenAI's $200 plan has shrunk from about $14,000 of usage to $2,000. Ben, via Theo, thinks Claude's subsidy ends when Anthropic IPOs. Then we rank the people in AI on our new tier list. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎯 IN THIS EPISODE: → The X Subscription: Cursor, Grok, Grok Bot and X Premium in one plan, $8 to $200 → Claude is out of your Cursor plan: top up credits, pay API prices → The Grok Bot trick that runs Claude Code and Codex on your own subscriptions (and the ban risk) → Theo's logs: about 1M coding requests, Codex to Claude Code the week Opus 5.5 shipped → The $200 plan that went from $14,000 to $2,000, and why the Anthropic IPO could do the same to Claude Max → FT: Anthropic made $16.8B in Q3, growth slowed from 143% to 46%. Ben's counter: another Salesforce in it → Meta's Muse Wonder (52, and 56 inside Muse Code), Gemini 4 Argon (53), five labs near the top → Google Play opens to vibe-coded apps, no developer account → Alexandr Wang's 19th birthday table, and our AI people tier list (godmodepod.com/rank) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱ CHAPTERS: 00:00 Who's still paying for Claude? 00:53 The 5 big leaps in AI, from ChatGPT to Opus 5.5 02:28 Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Haiku and self-improving systems 05:04 The X Subscription: Cursor, Grok and X Premium in one plan 06:09 Claude moves to API pricing in Cursor 06:52 Why coders are the loss leaders on $200 plans 09:28 Can anyone compete? Will Cursor fold into Grok? 12:44 Run Claude Code inside Grok Bot on your own plan 14:13 Claude Code at the desk vs agents on the go 16:59 Theo's logs: Codex to Claude Code 18:37 Does the Anthropic IPO end the $200 subsidy? 19:48 Anthropic's growth: 143% to 46% 20:43 Ben: Anthropic has another Salesforce in it 23:00 a16z, Jevons paradox and Gavin Baker 24:23 Zuckerberg, Alexandr Wang and Meta's Muse Wonder 27:02 Why Google and Meta built cheaper models 29:15 Gemini 4 Argon and five labs at the frontier 30:51 Google Play opens to vibe coders 33:35 Alexandr Wang's 19th birthday table 36:04 The AI people tier list 46:14 Make your own tier list ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔗 MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: • The X Subscription (SpaceXSI): https://x.com/SpaceXSI/status/2109783... • Cursor on the new plans: https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/210978... • Cursor help, The X Subscription: https://cursor.com/help/the-x-subscri... • Matt Palmer (Cursor) on the tiers: https://x.com/mattyp/status/210978414... • Grok Bot + your Claude and ChatGPT plans (Corey Ganim): https://x.com/coreyganim/status/21104... • Andrew Warner's original tip: https://x.com/AndrewWarner/status/210... • Theo's Claude Code vs Codex logs: https://x.com/theo/status/21102860544... • a16z on token prices and GPU rentals: https://x.com/a16z/status/21086449268... • Gavin Baker, "everyone can win": https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/2110... • Artificial Analysis on Muse Wonder: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/... • Google Play and private vibe-coded apps: https://blog.google/products-and-plat... • The HRT intern table: https://x.com/GoshawkTrades/status/21... • Make your own AI tier list: https://godmodepod.com/rank ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 👤 HOSTS: Rik: x.com/rikventure Ben Broch: x.com/brochchain ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Listen on Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0ZBhl5I... Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Substack → https://godmodepod.substack.com/ New episodes every Saturday. #ClaudeMax #Anthropic #Claude #Cursor #GrokBot #vibecoding