According to Scheipper, Anthropic decided to essentially limit sessions for users, regardless of what level of membership they have, during the busiest periods of the company’s work week. “To manage the increased demand for the cloud, we are adjusting our 5-hour session limits for Free/Pro/Max subscriptions during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged,” they wrote. “Between 5am to 11am PT / 1pm to 7pm GMT on weekdays, you’ll hit your 5-hour session limit faster than before.”
The restrictions are kind of annoying, although the opaqueness of how much use Anthropic allows at first makes it difficult to understand how much it will affect users. Basically, anyone using the cloud between 8am and 2pm ET will now have to cut off their sessions — even if they’re paying for the company’s $100 per month maximum subscription tier. According to Schipper, the company believes that about 7% of users will now reach the session limit that did not previously exist, “especially for the Pro tier.” He suggested that users perform any “token-intensive background tasks” during off-peak hours to avoid being interrupted in the middle of a session.
Anthropic recently announced doubling the standard rate cap during off-peak hours, which now looks like it was an effort to encourage people to shift their usage outside of normal business hours. Now they are moving towards negative reinforcement by cutting people off. While Schipper explained that “overall the weekly limits remain the same, just how they are distributed throughout the week is changing,” that’s not exactly the way most people interact with these tools. They want access when they need access; They are not planning their sessions in advance.
All this has opened a window for OpenAI to move forward and win back some of the customers it has abandoned in recent months. Thibault Sotiaux, head of engineering for the company’s Codex coding assistant, announced on Twitter that the company is removing limitations on access to the platform. “We’ve reset codecs usage limits across all plans so everyone can experiment with the awesome plugins we launched, and because it took so long,” he wrote. “You can create unlimited things with Codex. Enjoy!”
It’s probably not a coincidence that this announcement came on the same day that Anthropic announced its cap. And OpenAI will likely maintain unlimited access until they start monetizing enough users, at which point another company will step in and fill the void with cap-free use. This process continues until the bill is due.
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