Anthropic is changing its usage limits — and its fanbase is already pointing fingers.
In a post on X, the OpenAI rival announced that it’s introducing new weekly rate limits to paid subscribers after it says a small handful of users abused their privileges and, essentially, ruined it for everyone else.
“Claude Code has seen unprecedented demand, especially as part of our Max plans,” Anthropic explained, referencing its highest subscription tier that runs $100 to $200 per month, depending on usage. “We’ll continue to support this growth while we work on making Claude Code even better. But for now, we need to make some changes.”
In a subsequent tweet, the AI company said, diplomatically, that some of Claude Code’s “biggest fans” have been running the tool “continuously in the background, 24/7.”
“These uses are remarkable and we want to enable them,” the tweet continued. “But a few outlying cases are very costly to support. For example, one user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan.”
To understand what’s going on here, we need to dig a bit into Anthropic’s pricing structure. Announced in April, the company’s Max tier offers so-called “power users,” or those who use its models a lot, the ability to send up to 900 messages every five hours, when it resets.
Though its $200-per-month price point parallels OpenAI’s GPT Pro, which offers unlimited access to specific models, Anthropic Max isn’t technically unlimited. A few weeks ago, it instituted a rate limit of 900 message every five hours — which is still a lot, but was instantly met with fury by users.
In a bigger sense, the fracas illustrates a looming problem for the AI industry: how it’s going to actually make money, since training and running AI models is extremely expensive. With users accustomed to freemium models like ChatGPT, many are in for a rude shock as companies like Anthropic start to raise prices to cover their costs.
In a statement to TechCrunch, an Anthropic spokesperson said that Max subscribers will be able to use up to 480 hours of Sonnet 4, its latest coding model, per week — a figure more than double the total number of hours in a week, but which could be spread across multiple workers on a team.
The spokesperson said that “most users won’t notice a difference” — but those who count themselves among that small minority of serious power users are already peeved.
“My AI bill is already $350 this month,” one Redditor remarked on r/artificial. “I think I’m going to look back on [this era] as ‘the good old days.'”
“Thanks for ruining everything,” another user on the r/ClaudeAI subreddit bemoaned.
“Congrats dipsh***, you DDoS’d yourselves into rate limits,” wrote another r/ClaudeAI user, referencing the distributed denial of service (DDoS) style of hack that constantly barrages servers with excessive traffic.
At the end of the day, it might seem impossible to imagine using any AI tool as much as these power users seem to be doing — but luckily, they’ll have until August 28, when the new usage limits hit, to finish up their power-hungry projects.
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