Anthropic lifts the five-hour Claude Code cap for some $200-plan users

What changed on Friday

Anthropic announced two things together. First, it renamed its two top consumer plans: Max 5x is now simply Max, and Max 20x is now Ultra. The prices did not move, at $100 and $200 a month, and existing subscribers do not have to do anything.

Second, Claude Code users on the $200 Ultra plan no longer face a rolling five-hour usage cap, as thenewstack.io reported. There are two conditions: the account must be verified, and the user must still have weekly usage left. Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, pointed to the change in a post of his own.

What the five-hour cap did

A rolling window means the clock is always moving. Your usage over the most recent five hours counts against a ceiling, and a heavy session can hit that ceiling quickly.

For people using Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool, that could be painful. You might be halfway through hunting down a bug or rewriting a large chunk of code when the tool stops and tells you to wait for a reset. That could happen even when your weekly allowance was far from used up.

Why some users must wait

Not every Ultra subscriber gets the change immediately. Anthropic says it checks accounts to guard against fraud and abuse, and the cap only goes away once an account has passed.

The check runs on its own and looks at account and payment history. There is no form to fill in and no way to hurry it along. Anthropic will send an email when the cap is lifted for you, so the practical advice is to watch your inbox.

The weekly limit is still there

This is the part to read twice. Ultra keeps the same weekly allowance as before. The pricing page lists it at 10 times the weekly usage of the Pro plan, against five times for Max.

Without the five-hour pause forcing breaks, a heavy user could simply reach the weekly ceiling sooner. Your conversations with Claude on the web, desktop or mobile count toward that same weekly pool as your Claude Code sessions.

When the weekly pool runs dry, you can switch on paid extra credits and keep working at standard rates for the API. The API is the channel developers use to connect their own software to Claude. Those credits cost money on top of the subscription.

Is Ultra worth the extra $100?

• You keep getting stopped mid-task but never finish the week's allowance: Ultra may be worth it, because the interruptions are what disappear.
• You already use up your weekly allowance early: removing the session cap gives you no extra included usage, so the case is weaker.
• You build apps on the API: the pricing page also bundles monthly API credits equal to the plan price, $100 with Max and $200 with Ultra, which may factor into your math.

The decision comes down to a simple question: where do you actually run out, within a session or within a week?

The competitive backdrop

The timing fits a wider pattern. A day before Anthropic's announcement, OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux said the company was raising usage limits for its Pro and Business Premium subscribers.

OpenAI also backed away from a planned reduction for current $200 Pro subscribers after customers complained. Separately, it dropped an idea to charge flat fees per job instead of billing by tokens, the small chunks of text that AI models read and write, after developers objected. Together, the two companies are showing that customers' reactions to limits and pricing can change plans quickly.