Anthropic has opened up Claude Code cloud sessions to all eligible subscribers and is handing out up to $250 in free promotional credits to get them started. The catch, as with most promotional offers, is in the fine print: there are deadlines, eligibility rules, and a GitHub account requirement that not everyone will be expecting.
Cloud sessions let Claude Code run on Anthropic’s own infrastructure rather than on your local machine. ‘Cloud sessions run on Anthropic-hosted infrastructure, so the work keeps going even without your computer running,’ Anthropic explained. You kick off a task, close the lid, and come back to it later, which is genuinely useful for longer agentic workflows that would otherwise stall the moment your laptop sleeps.
How Claude Code Cloud Sessions Work
Access to cloud sessions is available from several entry points: claude.ai, the Code section of the Claude mobile app, the desktop app, or the command-line interface using claude –cloud. Previously, cloud sessions were only available to users on a research preview. They are now officially available to eligible subscribers more broadly.
The credits themselves are kept separate from your normal Claude usage limits and are applied automatically when you start a cloud session. ‘If you hit a limit locally, keep going in the cloud until your credit runs out,’ Anthropic said. Once the promotional balance is gone, cloud sessions revert to counting against your standard plan limits. There is no separate charge for the cloud container itself.
Pro subscribers receive $100 in promotional credits, while Max subscribers receive $250. Eligibility is restricted to individual Pro and Max subscribers who held an active subscription when the promotion began on 23 September.
Deadlines and the GitHub Requirement
The offer is time-limited on both ends. According to explainx.ai, the deadline to claim the credits is 11:59 PM PT on 7 October 2026, and any remaining balance expires at 11:59 PM PT on 4 November 2026. Those are tighter windows than they first appear: claim the credit late and you could end up with only weeks of runway before the balance vanishes.
There is also a prerequisite that the headline number tends to obscure. AIToolsReview notes that connecting a GitHub account is required in order to claim the credits. For developers who already have Claude tied to their GitHub workflow, that is a non-issue. For everyone else, it is an extra step worth knowing about before you go looking for a redemption button.
The credits can be claimed directly from Claude’s website. Anthropic has not specified what happens if a subscriber’s eligibility lapsed between 23 September and when they attempt to claim, so if you are on the boundary, it is worth checking sooner rather than later.
The broader context here is that cloud sessions represent a meaningful shift in how agentic coding tools can be used. Keeping a coding agent running in the background, independent of your own hardware uptime, is the kind of capability that moves these tools from ‘assistant’ territory toward something closer to an autonomous collaborator. Whether the free credits are enough to make that shift feel routine is another question, but $250 of headroom is at least enough to form an opinion.
The promotion window closes at 11:59 PM PT on 7 October 2026. Any balance not spent by 4 November 2026 is forfeited.
