--- title: "Anthropic Users Melt Down After Company Institutes New Rate Limits" description: "Anthropic is changing its usage limits — and its fanbase is already pointing fingers. In a post on X, the OpenAI rival announced that it is introducing new weekly rate limits to paid subscribers after a small handful of users abused their privileges and, essentially, ruined it for everyone else. \"Claude Code has seen unprecedented demand, especially as part of our Max plans,\" Anthropic explained, referencing its highest subscription tier that runs $100 to $200 per month, depending on usage. \"We’ll continue to support this growth while we work on making Claude Code even better. But for now, we need […]" date: "2025-07-30" modified: "2025-07-30" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/anthropic-users-melt-down-usage" categories: - "Anthropic" - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Anthropic Users Melt Down After Company Institutes New Rate Limits ![Anthropic is changing its usage limits after a small group exploited its generosity — and its fanbase is already pointing fingers.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* Anthropic is changing its usage limits — and its fanbase is already pointing fingers. In a [post on X](), the OpenAI rival announced that it's introducing new weekly rate limits to paid subscribers after it says a small handful of users abused their privileges and, essentially, ruined it for everyone else. "Claude Code has seen unprecedented demand, especially as part of our Max plans," [Anthropic explained](), referencing its highest subscription tier that runs $100 to $200 per month, depending on usage. "We’ll continue to support this growth while we work on making Claude Code even better. But for now, we need to make some changes." In a subsequent tweet, the AI company said, diplomatically, that some of Claude Code's "biggest fans" have been running the tool "continuously in the background, 24/7." "These uses are remarkable and we want to enable them," the tweet continued. "But a few outlying cases are very costly to support. For example, one user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan." To understand what's going on here, we need to dig a bit into Anthropic's pricing structure. Announced in April, the company's Max tier offers so-called "power users," or those who use its models a lot, the ability to send [up to 900 messages]() every five hours, when it resets. Though its $200-per-month price point parallels [OpenAI's GPT Pro](), which offers unlimited access to specific models, Anthropic Max isn't *technically* unlimited. A few weeks ago, it instituted a rate limit of 900 message every five hours — which is still a lot, but was instantly [met with fury by users](). In a bigger sense, the fracas illustrates a looming problem for the AI industry: how it's going to actually make money, since training and running AI models is extremely expensive. With users accustomed to freemium models like ChatGPT, many are in for a rude shock as companies like Anthropic start to raise prices to cover their costs. In a [statement to *TechCrunch*](), an Anthropic spokesperson said that Max subscribers will be able to use up to 480 hours of Sonnet 4, its latest coding model, per week — a figure more than double the total number of hours in a week, but which could be spread across multiple workers on a team. The spokesperson said that "most users won’t notice a difference" — but those who count themselves among that small minority of serious power users are already peeved. "My AI bill is already $350 this month," [one Redditor remarked]() on r/artificial. "I think I'm going to look back on \[this era\] as 'the good old days.'" "Thanks for ruining everything," [another user]() on the r/ClaudeAI subreddit bemoaned. "Congrats dipsh\*\*\*, you DDoS'd yourselves into rate limits," [wrote another r/ClaudeAI user](), referencing the distributed denial of service (DDoS) style of hack that constantly barrages servers with excessive traffic. At the end of the day, it might [seem impossible to imagine]() using any AI tool as much as these power users seem to be doing — but luckily, they'll have until August 28, when the new usage limits hit, to finish up their power-hungry projects. **More on Anthropic:** [*Anthropic Let an AI Agent Run a Small Shop and the Result Was Unintentionally Hilarious*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()