If you’ve been using Claude heavily over the past few days, you may have noticed something feels different. That’s because Anthropic has changed the rules.
What changed
Anthropic adjusted Claude’s usage limits to better balance supply and demand. The core change: during peak hours — 5:00 to 11:00 AM Pacific Time — your 5-hour session limits get consumed faster. Your 5-hour window might effectively run out in much less than five hours during peaks.
Why? Because Anthropic ties usage to token consumption — without disclosing exactly how many tokens correspond to a time window. In practice, you get more during off-peak hours and less during peaks.
Weekly limits remain unchanged. It’s purely about hourly distribution.
The 2x promotion ends today
To soften the blow, Anthropic had been running a promotion since March 13: double usage limits during off-peak hours — for all plans, from Free to Max. On weekdays, doubled limits applied outside of 8 AM to 2 PM Eastern. On weekends, the doubled limits were available around the clock.
That promotion ends today, March 27, 2026, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time. Starting tomorrow, standard limits apply again.
Claude Code users hit hardest
The loudest complaints come from Claude Code users. Multiple Max subscribers report their 5-hour sessions being depleted within one to two hours — with the same workloads that previously caused no problems. Some Max 5x users claim their rate was spent after roughly 90 minutes of normal agentic tasks.
Whether this is a bug or a consequence of the new throttling is unclear. Anthropic hasn’t directly addressed these specific reports.
My take
This is the reality of the AI business in 2026: demand grows faster than compute capacity. Anthropic is being upfront about it — they openly say they’re capacity-constrained. Whether the solution is elegant is a different story.
For power users — especially Claude Code users — the throttling is noticeable. If you rely on agentic workflows, you now need to plan your work more strategically: heavy tasks during off-peak hours, lighter work during peaks.
It would be nice, though, if Anthropic were more transparent about how exactly the token-to-time conversion works. Without that information, the whole thing feels like a black box.
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