Why Anthropic is introducing weekly usage limits for Claude AI
What's the story
Anthropic has announced new weekly usage limits for its artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Claude. The move is aimed at curbing continuous background usage and account sharing among users. The restrictions will come into effect from August 28 across all subscription tiers, including the $20 Pro plan and higher-end $100 and $200 Max packages.
Restrictions
A look at the caps
Anthropic has announced that some users have been using Claude Code continuously or violating rules by reselling access or sharing their login details. To tackle this, the firm plans to introduce two new weekly caps: one for total usage and another specifically for its most advanced model, Claude Opus 4. The existing usage limits, which refresh every five hours, will remain unchanged.
Enhanced access
Max plan subscribers can now buy extra access
Subscribers on the Max plans shall now have the choice to buy extra access once they hit their weekly cap, using standard API pricing. This comes as Claude Code, the AI coding assistant, has been witnessing a surge in demand among developers. However, this popularity has also led to some challenges with several outages reported in the past month.
User impact
The new limits will impact fewer than 5% users
Despite the changes, an Anthropic spokesperson said that "most users won't notice a difference." The new limits are expected to impact fewer than 5% of users. Under the revised plans, Pro plan subscribers can expect around 40-80 hours of Claude Code using Sonnet 4 every week. The $100 Max plan subscribers will get 140-280 hours of Sonnet and 15-35 hours of Opus per week.