Claude's $200 Price Plan Removes '5-Hour Limit'... All-Nighters of Coding Now Allowed
AI company Anthropic has removed the '5-hour usage limit' on Claude's top-tier $200 monthly plan. All-nighters of coding are now possible without worrying about sessions being cut off. Following OpenAI's doubling of usage limits across all paid plans just a day earlier, analysts assess that a 'limit relaxation competition' in AI subscription services has begun.
Anthropic announced the plan restructuring through its official account on the 30th (local time) of last month. The $100 monthly 'Claude Pro 5x' plan was renamed 'Claude Pro', and the $200 monthly 'Claude Pro 20x' plan was renamed 'Ultra', with prices remaining unchanged. The key change is in the Ultra tier. Previously, all plans had a 'rolling limit' where sessions would lock after 5 hours of usage, but for authenticated Ultra accounts, this limit disappears. Authentication is processed automatically based on account and payment history, and new accounts immediately after signup have a temporary limit applied, which is removed and notified via email upon release.
However, it is not 'unlimited'. According to Anthropic's Help Center, Ultra's weekly usage limit remains unchanged. It has a weekly limit at around 10 times that of the standard Pro plan, and the latest model has an additional separate weekly limit applied. While you can now use the service for an entire night straight, the ceiling on the weekly total remains the same.
This measure also marks a turning point in policy from last summer. In late July of last year, Anthropic introduced weekly usage limits to discourage some users from 24-hour continuous operation and account resale, which met with backlash from the developer community. The company explained at the time that fewer than 5% of users were affected. According to E Daily, Anthropic's subscription product manager also apologized during this restructuring, saying that the previous notation of '20x' caused misunderstanding.
Timing points to competition. Just one day earlier, on the 29th, OpenAI doubled the usage limits for all paid tiers of ChatGPT immediately and also withdrew plans to downsize the upper-tier plan that had been under discussion. With the two companies releasing 'we'll let you use more' within a day of each other, it is read as a signal that the AI industry, which is beginning to gain supply capacity through large-scale data center investments, is now shifting its competitive axis from restricting usage to opening it up.
User reactions are not entirely welcoming. In overseas developer communities, there are both complaints that weekly limits are exhausted in two days and grievances that authentication has yet to be processed despite months of paid subscription. With the session constraint released but the overall ceiling remaining the same, the user experience from this restructuring is expected to vary depending on whether the user is one who uses 'how long' or 'how much' capacity.