Anthropic adjusts Claude usage limits during peak hours, affecting 7% of users

Anthropic tweaks Claude usage limits to manage capacity

AI biz makes some Claude conversations more costly to manage capacity Anthropic on Wednesday adjusted its opaque usage limits for Claude customers by reducing the power of the services it delivers during times of peak demand, in an effort to balance demand with its capacity to deliver service. In a social media post, Thariq Shihipar, a member of Anthropic's technical team, wrote: "To manage growing demand for Claude we're adjusting our five hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged." The change means that during peak hours - 05:00 - 11:00 PT or 13:00 - 19:00 GMT - Claude users could burn five hours' worth of usage time in under five hours. At other times of day, a five-hour access allowance will allow five hours of access. That odd definition of timed use is possible because Anthropic ties hourly use to token consumption - without revealing exactly how many tokens it ties to timed use. According to Shihipar, "~7 percent of users will hit session limits they wouldn't have before, particularly for pro tiers. If you run token-intensive background jobs, shifting them to off-peak hours will stretch your session limits further." Anthropic has expanded capacity during other times of day when demand is lower, so there's no net loss in terms of usage limits. "Overall weekly limits stay the same, just how they're distributed across the week is changing," Shihipar explained. "I know this was frustrating. We're continuing to invest in scaling efficiently. I'll keep you posted on progress." Anthropic sells its AI services in two forms: an API and subscriptions. API customers pay a published rate for various forms of token usage - Base Input Tokens, 5m Cache Writes, 1h Cache Writes, Cache Hits & Refreshes, and Output Tokens. Subscription customers - Free, Pro ($20/month), Max 5x ($100/month), and Max 20x ($200/month ) - can use Claude subject to unpublished usage limits. Anthropic does not specify exactly how it calculates those limits and users don't have any way to plan for token usage. "Your usage is affected by several factors, including the length and complexity of your conversations, the features you use, and which Claude model you're chatting with," the company explains Anthropic's documentation. "Different subscription plans (Pro, Max, Team, etc.) have different usage allowances, with paid plans offering higher limits." Claude customers can access a dashboard that shows their progress towards consuming their five-hour daily session limits, and weekly usage limits. If users exceed limits, Claude locks them out ... unless they pay for extra usage. Under this new token allocation regime, developers can expect to get more done during off hours and less at other times. Although, really, what kind of Californian is awake and pounding code at 5 a.m. anyway? ®

Anthropic confirms it's been 'adjusting' Claude usage limits

The changes impact approximately 7% of users across Free, Pro, and Max tiers who now hit session limits faster during high-demand periods. If it feels like you've been hitting your Claude usage limits much more quickly over the past week, you're absolutely right. Anthropic has confirmed that it has been "adjusting" the five-hour usage limits for Claude Free, Pro, and Max users during the peak hours of 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. on weekdays, while leaving overall weekly limits unchanged. The news comes via a Reddit post from an Anthropic representative. I reached out to Anthropic and confirmed the post is authentic. The Anthropic post doesn't specify when the usage limit adjustment took place, but my understanding is the new rate limits kicked in on Monday. Claude users have been complaining bitterly about how quickly they've been hitting their usage limits over the past week or so, and many had suspected a silent reduction in their five-hour usage allotments. Turns out they were right. Anthropic says it imposed the adjusted usage limits to "manage growing demand for Claude." "We've landed a lot of efficiency wins to offset this, but ~7% of users will hit session limits they wouldn't have had before, particularly in Pro tiers," the Anthropic post continues. "If you run token-intensive background jobs, shifting them to off-peak hours will stretch your session limits further." Anthropic acknowledged that the limit adjustment "was frustrating" and that it is "continuing to invest in scaling efficiently." Word of Anthropic throttling peak usage limits comes amid a surge of interest in Claude following its legal standoff with the Defense Department, which has sought to tag Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" after the company balked at signing a military contract. A judge recently stayed the Pentagon's move to apply the "supply chain risk" label. Anthropic's move to adjust its five-hour usage limits speaks to a bigger issue: how the big AI providers treat subscribers on flat-rate plans. In the past, AI users on "plus," "pro," or "max" plans (which cost anywhere from $10-250 a month, depending on the provider) rarely hit usage limits because they were simply chatting with models in a web-based chatbox. But with the rise of agentic AI functionality such as vibe-coding applications and "computer use" abilities, flat-rate AI subscribers are burning far more tokens than ever before, and the big AI providers are struggling to keep up with the demand. The problem is exacerbated by Claude's enormous one-million token context window, which was rolled out earlier this month. What's happening now is that Anthropic and other AI companies are hitting the brakes on flat-rate usage, sometimes silently. And no, it's not cool.