Anthropic unveils new rate limits to curb Claude Code power users

Anthropic has announced the implementation of weekly rate limits for its AI coding tool, Claude Code, aimed at managing usage among subscribers who have been running the tool continuously. The company revealed that these limits will help address issues related to account sharing and unauthorized reselling of access to Claude Code. Starting August 28, the new rate limits will apply to subscribers of Anthropic's $20-per-month Pro plan, as well as the $100 and $200-per-month Max plans. In a recent communication to subscribers and a post on social media, Anthropic indicated that they expect these limits to affect less than 5% of their user base based on current consumption patterns. While existing usage limits, which reset every five hours, will remain unchanged, Anthropic is introducing two new weekly limits that will reset every seven days. One of these is a general usage cap, while the other is specifically tailored for the advanced AI model, Claude Opus 4. For Max plan subscribers, additional usage can be purchased beyond the specified limits at standard API rates. This announcement follows a series of outages experienced by Claude Code in the past month, with the service facing partial or major disruptions at least seven times. The company has acknowledged that some power users are running the tool non-stop, contributing to these issues. Anthropic has previously noted its limitations in computational resources, a challenge faced by many AI providers today. In response to the growing demand for AI services, several AI companies, including Anthropic, are re-evaluating their pricing strategies. Earlier this year, Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, adjusted its pricing to curtail excessive usage by power users. Similarly, Replit also made changes to their pricing structures. In a recent email to subscribers, Anthropic reassured users of its commitment to supporting long-running use cases and mentioned that these rate limits are a necessary step to ensure reliable service for the broader user community in the short term.