Humanity says that among subscribers running the AI coding tool Claude Code, Claude will roll out a new weekly rate limit for use by Claude with “continuously used in the background 24/7”. Humanity says rate limits aim to stop a small number of users who are violating Claude’s usage policy by sharing accounts and reselling access to Claude Codes.
The new rate limit will come into effect on August 28th for Pro Plan subscribers for humanity, which is $20 per month, and for maximum plans of $100 and $200 per month.
Humanity says that existing usage restrictions that are reset every five hours remain intact. The company is also introducing two new weekly rate limits that reset every seven days. One is an overall usage limitation, while the other is specific to the Claude Opus 4, the most advanced AI model of humanity. Humanity says that at standard API rates, the largest subscribers can purchase additional usage beyond what rate limits offer.
The announcement comes weeks after the humanity of Claude Code was quietly introduced. The company said it was aware of the issue at the time but refused to go into further detail. Anthropic’s AI coding tool has been a hit with developers, but the company appears to be struggling to offer it widely. Anthropic’s status page shows that the Claude code experienced at least seven partial or major outages last month. Perhaps because some power users seem to be running Claude code non-stop.
“Claude Code has experienced unprecedented demand since its launch,” Humanity spokesman Amy Rotherham said in an email to TechCrunch about weekly fee restrictions. Rotherham states that “most users don’t notice the difference,” but did not provide details on the amount of usage that subscribers should currently expect.
The company notes that the limit will affect less than 5% of subscribers based on current usage patterns. According to humanity, most Pro users can expect 40-80 hours of Sonnet 4 within weekly rate limits. However, we believe that usage may vary depending on the size of the codebase and other factors.
Humanity has previously stated that it is extremely limited when it comes to computing resources. This seems to be true for most AI model providers today. Most AI companies compete to deliver new AI data centers online to meet the huge demands of serving and training AI models.
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Several providers of AI coding tools are rethinking their pricing strategies for their products. In June, the company behind Anysphere, behind Cursor, changed the way power users priced Pro plans for $20 per month, in order to limit plans abuse. However, Anysphere later apologised for inadequately conveying these changes, resulting in some users paying more than they expected. Another AI coding tool provider, Replit, made a similar pricing change in June.
In an email to Claude subscribers, Anthropic said it is “committed to supporting long-term use cases through other options in the future.” However, the company argues that these rate limits will help maintain a wide range of reliable services in the short term.
Updated 1:37 PM PT: This story has been updated and contains comments from human spokesmen.
