Thought Leadership
Anthropic has announced new weekly usage limits for its AI assistant Claude in order to curb the intensive use of the coding tool Claude Code. This mainly affects users who run the system around the clock, so-called power users.
Anthropic justifies the measure with individual subscribers who would run Claude Code “24/7”. In addition, the new limits are intended to take action against users who violate the usage guidelines by sharing accounts or reselling access to Claude.
The new restrictions go into effect Aug. 28 for subscribers to the $20 Pro plan and the $100 and $200 Max plans, the company said in an email to customers and a post on X.
Claude Code, especially as part of our subscription bundle, has seen unprecedented growth. At the same time, we’ve identified policy violations like account sharing and reselling access—and advanced usage patterns like running Claude 24/7 in the background—that are impacting system capacity for all. Our new rate limits address these issues and provide a more equitable experience for all users.
Anthropic in an e-mail to customers
However, according to the company, the new limits should affect less than 5 percent of users.
Existing limits remain in place
The previous usage limits, which are reset every five hours, will remain in place. In addition, Anthropic is introducing two new weekly rate limits that reset every seven days. One is for general usage, the other is specifically for Anthropic’s most advanced AI model, Claude Opus 4. Max subscribers can purchase additional usage beyond the limits at standard API pricing.
Service problems due to high demand
Although Claude Code has been well received by developers, Anthropic appears to be struggling to provide the service across the board. The company’s status page shows that Claude Code has partially or completely failed at least seven times in the last month – possibly because power users are running the system permanently.
Anthropic assured subscribers in the email that it was “committed to supporting long-term use cases through other options in the future”. The rate limits are intended to help ensure reliable service for all in the short term.
