Anthropic recently announced weekly rate limits for the first time. These limits are to help control the adoption of its advanced AI model Claude Code. These changes go into effect on August 28. Aside from possibly all of them, they’ll most heavily impact subscribers to the company’s $20-per-month Pro plan and the $100 and $200-per-month Max plans. Anthropic is encouraging responsible use and taking steps to prevent abusive over-use. They further want to discourage people from sharing their accounts with an entire dorm full of users.
As it stands today, Anthropic works within usage caps that reset every five hours. The new weekly rate limits will still be in force. They should refresh every week, but at least once every seven days. The new structure consists of two distinct limits: one general usage cap and another specifically targeting the usage of Claude Opus 4, Anthropic’s most advanced AI model.
Roughly half of Pro users can continue to reach 40–80 hours of Sonnet 4 per week. This is still the case, even under the new regulation. On top of that, Max subscribers will be able to pay for additional usage over their included amounts at regular API prices. It’s this flexibility that helps us serve our most long-running and common use cases. Anthropic is committed to offering alternatives in the future.
The company is also coming to terms with its own limitations with computational resources, which add to the justifications for these new measures. According to internal estimates, these rate limits won’t affect more than 5% of subscribers. This primarily impacts people who have Claude Code running in the background at all times. This group has already been targeted as abusers of Claude’s usage policy for account sharing and reselling access.
Anthropic’s decision follows a trend among AI coding tool providers, as seen with Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, which altered its pricing model in June to deter power users from exploiting their Pro plan. Like the other competitor, Replit, that introduced new pricing that month. These industry-wide adjustments are part of a larger initiative to share limited resources wisely, while promoting equity and access for all users.
Additionally, Anthropic’s status page indicates that Claude Code has experienced multiple outages—at least seven partial or major disruptions in the past month. Users will find it easier to access the services with these new weekly rate limits providing smoother access. They’ll alleviate chronic, crippling congestion on the system—and do it while even more demand pours in.