Anthropic's decision to restrict access is due to the rising popularity of Claude's code

Anthropic's decision to restrict access is due to the rising popularity of Claude's code

In a move aimed at maintaining a reliable user experience, Anthropic has announced new weekly rate limits for its AI development tool, Claude Code. The changes are intended to address excessive usage patterns that have been impacting system capacity and degrading service quality for other users [2][3][5].

The rate limits are primarily in response to policy violations such as account sharing and reselling access, as well as users running Claude Code 24/7 in the background [2][3][5]. These measures support fairer resource allocation and platform sustainability by limiting excessive or abusive use, complementing existing 5-hour rolling limits with a weekly reset to better control long-term usage [2][3].

The effects of these changes vary across subscription tiers, with limits scaled according to plan level and AI model used. For instance, Pro users on a $20/month subscription will receive 40-80 hours of Claude Code time weekly with the Sonnet 4 model, while Max users paying $100/month will get 140-280 hours of Sonnet and 15-35 hours of Opus 4 [2][3][5]. Max users paying $200/month will receive 240-480 Sonnet hours and 24-40 Opus hours [2][3].

Anthropic emphasizes these limits as a short-term solution to maintain reliability while exploring future options for supporting long-running and intensive use cases [3]. However, these changes may affect the top 5% of users, who may reach the limits sooner and thus experience restrictions or need to purchase additional usage at standard API rates [2][3][5].

The AI tools space is grappling with the problem of tools becoming incredibly powerful but not infinite. The rate limits for Claude Code may push serious developers to explore alternative tools due to potential unreliability for 24/7 use [6]. Other AI development tools, such as Cursor and Replit, have also adjusted their pricing strategies in response to high demand from heavy users [7].

It's worth noting that Anthropic's $200 Max plan, previously advertised as offering 20x the usage of the Pro tier, only provides about 6x the Claude Code hours according to the new hourly estimates [8]. Additionally, some users have been sharing or reselling accounts, which may also be a factor in the rate limits [1].

Anthropic's status page has reported at least seven service outages for Claude Code in the past month [9]. The new weekly rate limits will apply to Pro and Max subscriptions and will be implemented starting August 28 [10].

References:

1. [Link to reference 1]
2. [Link to reference 2]
3. [Link to reference 3]
4. [Link to reference 4]
5. [Link to reference 5]
6. [Link to reference 6]
7. [Link to reference 7]
8. [Link to reference 8]
9. [Link to reference 9]
10. [Link to reference 10]
11. The new weekly rate limits for Claude Code, aimed at addressing excessive usage patterns, are primarily in response to policy violations such as account sharing, reselling access, and users running the AI development tool 24/7 in the background.
12. These measures, including a weekly reset to better control long-term usage, support fairer resource allocation and platform sustainability by limiting excessive or abusive use, complementing existing 5-hour rolling limits.

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