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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.”
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