Anthropic finally explains why Claude usage limits feel tighter for some users

Anthropic has acknowledged that Claude’s 5-hour session limits now deplete faster during weekday peak hours. This comes after days of user complaints that went unanswered.

The explanation came not through a blog post or official statement, but through a thread on X posted by Thariq, a member of Anthropic’s team. According to Thariq, the change affects users on free, Pro, and Max plans between 5am and 11am PT on weekdays. Weekly limits stay the same, but your session budget burns through quicker during those windows.

About 7% of users, according to Thariq, will now hit limits they would not have hit before. Pro subscribers are the most affected. Max 20x users are largely insulated, with only around 2% of that group seeing any real difference.

That is cold comfort for the people who have been complaining since earlier this week. We covered the initial wave of frustration in our earlier report, where Max plan subscribers were watching usage meters jump from 52% to 91% in minutes, with no explanation from Anthropic at all.

Some of those users still are not satisfied. One person on X said they canceled their subscription after a week of silence. Another called it a rug pull. Thariq acknowledged the frustration and even admitted he “probably should not have dunked” on someone in an earlier reply, which at least suggests the backlash registered.

A handful of the extreme cases in the thread are being treated as possible bugs rather than expected behavior. Thariq pointed to expensive prompt cache misses as a likely culprit when sessions drain faster than they should, especially for users resuming long conversations with large context windows. He said he would post a separate thread on how to avoid it.

The off-peak 2x usage promo that Anthropic announced in mid-March is still running for another week, so sessions outside that peak window should still benefit from the extra headroom.

That said, OpenAI customers are getting the opposite treatment. Earlier today, OpenAI’s Tibo posted on X that the company had reset Codex usage limits across all plans so users could experiment freely with a set of newly launched plugins. No conditions, no peak-hour carve-outs. Just a reset.

While Anthropic is quietly trimming what paying users can do during busy hours, OpenAI is handing out extra headroom as a goodwill gesture. So this really isn’t a good look for Anthropic.

For people paying $200/month, having to check for a post on X to know what’s going on with their usage limits is pretty rough.

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