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Anthropic announced today it would introduce weekly rate limits for Claude subscribers, claiming that some users have been running Claude 24/7, with the majority of usage centered around its Claude Code product.
Overall weekly limits will begin on August 28 and will be in conjunction with the current 5-hour limits. Anthropic said the throttling will only affect 5% of its total users.
Not surprisingly, many developers and other users reacted negatively to the news, claiming that the move unfairly punishes more people for the actions of a few. The move also raises the question of how enterprises hoping to run more long-running projects could reach their usage limits much faster.
“Claude Code has experienced unprecedented demand since launch. We designed our plans to give developers generous access to Claude, and while most users operate within normal patterns, we’ve also seen policy violations like account sharing and reselling access, which affects performance for everyone,” Anthropic said in a statement sent to VentureBeat.
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It added in an email sent to Claude subscribers that it also noticed “advanced usage patterns like running Claude 24/7 in the background that are impacting system capacity for all.”
Anthropic added that it continues to support “long running use cases through other options in the future, but until then, weekly limits will help us maintain reliable service for everyone.”
The new rate limits
Anthropic did not specify what the rate limits are, but said most Claude Max 20x users “can expect 240-480 hours of Sonnet 4 and 24-40 hours of Opus 4 within their weekly rate limits.” Heavy users of the Opus model or those who run multiple instances of Claude Code simultaneously can reach these limits sooner. The company insisted that “most users won’t notice any difference, the weekly limits are designed to support typical daily use across your projects.”
For users that do hit the weekly usage limit, they can buy more usage “at standard API rates to continue working without interruption.” Many enterprises may already have an agreement with Anthropic around rate limits, but some organizations may be using one of the subscription tiers with Claude. This could mean companies needing to buy more usage access to run some projects.
The additional rate limits come as users experienced reliability issues with Claude, which Anthropic acknowledged. The company stated that it is working on addressing any remaining issues over the next few days.
Anthropic has been making waves in the developer community, even helping push for the ubiquity of AI coding tools. In June, the company transformed the Claude AI assistant into a no-code platform for all users and launched a financial services-specific version of Claude for the Enterprise tier.
Rate limits exist to ensure that model providers and chat platforms have the bandwidth to respond to user prompts. Although some companies, such as Google, have slowly removed limits for specific models, others, including OpenAI and Anthropic, offer different tiers of rate limits to their users. The idea is that power users will pay more for the compute power they need, while users who use these platforms less will not have to.
However, rate limits may limit the use cases people can perform, especially for those experimenting with long-running agents or working on larger coding projects.
Backlash already
Understandably, many paying Claude users found the decision to throttle their usage limits distasteful, decrying that Anthropic is penalizing power users for the actions of a few who are abusing the system.
Although other Claude users gave Anthropic the benefit of the doubt, understanding that there is little the company can do when people use the models and the Claude platform to their limits.
