Multiple customers of Anthropic PBC’s Claude artificial intelligence assistant believe their usage limits were quietly lowered this week.
News reported on Thursday that the issue affected users of Claude’s top-end Max tier, which costs $200 a month. The customers in question encountered an error message that read “Claude usage limit reached.” The service reset this limit after a few hours, allowing users to continue their work.
The customer complaints appear to have coincided with a series of technical issues that affected Anthropic’s infrastructure. The company has experienced more than a half dozen service disruptions since Monday, the day when the usage limit changes reportedly emerged.
“We’re aware that some Claude Code users are experiencing slower response times,” an Anthropic spokesperson told News. “We’re working to resolve these issues.”
Many of the customers who experienced the issue use Claude Code, a programming assistant included in the service’s paid plans. The assistant can be accessed from the interface of popular code editors and via the command line. It’s powered by Anthropic’s latest Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4 large language models.
The company described Claude Opus 4 as the “world’s best coding model” when it launched in May. The LLM set a new record on SWE-bench, a benchmark used to compare AI systems’ programming proficiency. It also bested the previous highest score on Terminal-bench, which measures how well LLMs use the command line.
The model can create “memory files” to store information about the programming project that it’s working on. According to Anthropic, those files help the model to tackle complex coding tasks more effectively.
Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 were affected by several of the service disruptions that Anthropic experienced this week. That may have been a factor behind the issues reported by Claude Code customers. Depending on the user’s subscription, Claude Code generates prompts using Claude Opus 4, Claude Sonnet 4 or both.
On Thursday, Anthropic updated the section of its knowledge base that covers Claude’s usage limits. According to the revised explainer, customers may send up to 900 “messages” to Claude every five hours depending on their plan. The number of messages that a chat session generates depends on factors such as the size of uploaded attachments.
Customers of Claude’s top-end Max plan may launch up to 50 five-hour sessions per month. According to the knowledge base article, Anthropic may throttle users’ access if they exceed the limit. The company estimates that 50 sessions are sufficient for up to 250 hours of Claude usage per month.
Image: Anthropic
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