Estate planning as a Claude account holder

Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant. As of September 2026, claude.com/pricing publishes a free tier, Claude Pro at $17 per month on the annual plan ($200 billed up front) or $20 billed monthly, and Claude Max from $100 per month with a choice of 5x or 20x Pro usage, alongside Team and Enterprise tiers. An Anthropic account holds conversation history, Claude Projects, uploaded files, and artifacts. Anthropic publishes no bereavement or deceased-user process, no account transfer mechanism, and no legacy contact feature on any tier. The Consumer Terms let Anthropic delete any Materials or other data associated with the account on termination, at its option. Deleted conversations leave chat history immediately and are removed from back-end storage within 30 days. A Pro or Max subscription renews automatically and keeps charging the payment method on file until someone cancels it, so an unattended account is an ongoing cost to the estate. Separately, an Anthropic API account can carry prepaid credits that expire one year from issue and are destroyed outright if the account is closed. Claude for Work (Team and Enterprise) accounts have stronger continuity through organizational ownership and the Primary Owner role.

Under Claude's terms, accounts are not property of the account holder and are forfeited when the account closes at death. No estate planning document—will, trust, or otherwise—can override this forfeiture.

What happens at death

Anthropic publishes no bereavement or deceased-user policy on any surface, and no legacy-contact or beneficiary feature exists on any tier. This was established by a full scan of both help centers rather than inferred from site silence (409 English articles, positive- and nonsense-controlled; see dataQualityNotes). The Consumer Terms of Service (effective October 8, 2025) state, in Section 12: "These Terms may not be transferred or assigned by you without our prior written consent, but may be assigned by us without restriction." No provision in the Terms addresses death, succession, inheritance, or estate access. Upon termination, "we may at our option delete any Materials or other data associated with your Account." Anthropic may also terminate an account inactive for over a year without a paid subscription, providing notice before doing so. Payments are generally non-refundable, and a pro-rata refund arises only where Anthropic itself terminates a paid subscription. Subscriptions automatically renew and the payment method on file is charged for each successive term, so a Pro or Max plan keeps billing the estate until it is cancelled. The Privacy Policy (effective September 10, 2026) publishes a privacy rights intake and states: "Where a third party representative submits a request on behalf of a data subject, we require evidence of authorization to act on behalf of the data subject." That authorized-representative route is the only published intake an executor can use without the decedent's credentials, and Anthropic answers it at its discretion.