Anthropic email to Max customers Re: Max account usage limits
Next month, we're introducing new weekly rate limits for Claude subscribers, affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.
Claude Code, especially as part of our subscription bundle, has seen unprecedented growth. At the same time, we’ve identified policy violations like account sharing and reselling access—and advanced usage patterns like running Claude 24/7 in the background—that are impacting system capacity for all. Our new rate limits address these issues and provide a more equitable experience for all users.
What’s changing:
Starting August 28, we're introducing weekly usage limits alongside our existing 5-hour limits:
Current: Usage limit that resets every 5 hours (no change)
New: Overall weekly limit that resets every 7 days
New: Claude Opus 4 weekly limit that resets every 7 days
As we learn more about how developers use Claude Code, we may adjust usage limits to better serve our community.
Most users won't notice any difference. The weekly limits are designed to support typical daily use across your projects.
Most Max 20x users can expect 240-480 hours of Sonnet 4 and 24-40 hours of Opus 4 within their weekly rate limits. Heavy Opus users with large codebases or those running multiple Claude Code instances in parallel will hit their limits sooner.
If you do reach a weekly usage limit, you’ll have the option to purchase more usage at standard API rates to continue working without interruption. This is completely optional.
You can manage or cancel your subscription anytime in Settings.
We also recognize that during this same period, users have encountered several reliability and performance issues. We've been working to fix these as quickly as possible and will continue addressing any remaining issues over the coming days and weeks.
–The Anthropic Team