Anthropic has announced new weekly usage restrictions for Claude AI, aimed at preventing people from running its coding tool non-stop or sharing accounts with others. The fresh limits will be introduced from August 28 and will apply to users across all paid plans, including the $20 Pro tier and the higher-priced $100 and $200 Max plans.
In an email to users and a post on social media, Anthropic said some people were keeping Claude Code running continuously in the background or violating its rules by reselling access or sharing login details. The company now plans to introduce two new weekly caps: one on total usage, and another specifically for the Claude Opus 4 model, its most advanced version.
The company clarified that the current usage limits (which refresh every five hours) will remain unchanged. However, users on the Max plans will now have an option to buy extra access once they hit their weekly cap, using standard API pricing.
These changes come at a time when Claude Code, the AI coding assistant, has been seeing increased demand among developers. But this growing popularity has also brought some challenges. According to Anthropic’s system status page, the tool has faced several outages in the past month, possibly due to some users running it around the clock.
“Claude Code has experienced unprecedented demand since launch,” Anthropic spokesperson Amie Rotherham told TechCrunch in an email. She also said that “most users won’t notice a difference,” and that the new limits are expected to affect fewer than 5 per cent of users.
As per the updated plans, subscribers of the Pro tier can expect 40 to 80 hours of Claude Code using Sonnet 4 each week. Those on the $100 Max plan will get 140 to 280 hours of Sonnet 4 and 15 to 35 hours of Opus 4. Users on the $200 Max plan will be allowed 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet 4 and 24 to 40 hours of Opus 4 in a week.
Anthropic didn’t explain how exactly usage is being tracked — whether it’s by number of tokens used, compute time, or hours spent. While the company earlier claimed the $200 plan offers 20 times more access than the Pro tier, the latest numbers suggest the increase may be closer to six times in actual usage hours.
This move follows a trend among AI tool providers, who are reworking their pricing and usage models to prevent abuse. In June, Anysphere, the team behind Cursor, made similar changes for its Pro plan, which led to confusion and criticism after users were unexpectedly charged more. Around the same time, another company, Replit, also adjusted its pricing structure.
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