Anthropic Tweaks Timed Usage Limits to Discourage Claude Demand During Peak Hours
Anthropic has quietly restructured how Claude Code's five-hour session limits are metered — and if your workflows have been burning through limits faster than usual, this is why. Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic engineering posted on X that the company is now reducing effective token throughput during peak hours (05:00–11:00 PT / 13:00–19:00 GMT) while expanding it during off-peak windows. The net weekly token budget is unchanged, but the same five-hour session now counts tokens faster at peak and slower at off-peak. The Register reports that approximately 7% of users — primarily those running token-intensive background jobs — will hit session limits they didn't previously hit under the old uniform metering.
The practical impact is sharpest for anyone running CI/CD agentic loops, long multi-file refactor sessions, or multi-agent orchestration during US business hours. Those workflows can now exhaust a day's effective budget significantly faster than they did a week ago. The straightforward mitigation is to shift heavy token jobs to off-peak windows — US evenings or overnight — where the same token spend now goes further. API customers paying per token are not affected; only flat-rate subscription holders (Pro, Max, Team) see the change. The Register also called out that Anthropic still does not publicly disclose how many tokens constitute a five-hour session window, making the actual impact difficult to calculate independently. Monitoring daily and weekly progress via the new usage dashboard is currently the only reliable way to gauge exposure.