Hope you weren’t counting on having Claude handle your workload for the week, because its office hours have changed. Earlier this week, Thariq Shihipar, a member of Anthropic’s technical team, announced via Twitter that the company would be throttling usage during peak hours—a move that OpenAI seems to be taking as an opportunity to steal some customers by getting rid of caps for its own model.
According to Shihipar, Anthropic has decided to essentially limit sessions for users, regardless of what level of subscription they have, during the company’s busiest periods of the work week. “To manage growing demand for Claude we’re adjusting our 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged,” he wrote. “During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you’ll move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before.”
The restrictions are kind of jarring, though the opaqueness of just how much usage Anthropic allows in the first place makes it difficult to understand exactly how much it’ll affect users. Basically, anyone using Claude between 8am and 2pm ET will now have to cut their sessions short—even if they are paying for the company’s $100 per month Max subscription tier. Per Shihipar, the company believes that about 7% of users will now hit session limits they wouldn’t have before, “particularly for pro tiers.” He recommended users run any “token-intensive background jobs” during off-peak hours to avoid getting throttled mid-session.
Anthropic had recently announced offering double the standard rate limit during off-peak hours, which now reads like it was an attempt to incentivize people to shift their usage outside of normal business hours. Now they’re shifting to negative reinforcement by cutting people off. While Shihipar explained that “Overall weekly limits stay the same, just how they’re distributed across the week is changing,” that’s just not the way most people interact with these tools. They want access when they need access; they aren’t planning their sessions out in advance.
All of that has seemingly opened a window for OpenAI to slide in and win back some customers who may have left in recent months. Thibault Sottiaux, the engineering lead for the company’s Codex coding assistant, announced on Twitter that the company was removing caps for access to the platform. “We have reset Codex usage limits across all plans to let everyone experiment with the magnificent plugins we just launched, and because it had been a while,” he wrote. “You can just build unlimited things with Codex. Have fun!”
It’s probably not a coincidence that the announcement came on the same day Anthropic announced its caps. And OpenAI will probably maintain unlimited access until they’ve captured enough users to start monetizing them, at which point another company will step up and fill the void with cap-free usage. The cycle continues until the bill comes due.
