To address the growing user demand and balance system load, Anthropic officially announced on March 26, 2026, adjustments to the usage limit rules for Claude.

The new rules introduced a "peak and off-peak pricing" logic similar to the power system: during peak usage hours, users' conversation costs will become more "expensive." This adjustment aims to guide users to stagger their usage through economic incentives, ensuring service stability during high-load periods.

Peak hour consumption acceleration: 7% of subscribed users will be affected

According to a statement released by technical team member Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic, this adjustment mainly affects free, Pro, and Max subscription users.

During peak hours from 05:00 to 11:00 Pacific Time (20:00 to 02:00 Beijing Time), the 5-hour session limit for Claude will be reduced, meaning the same operation will consume the quota faster during peak hours than usual. According to official estimates, about 7% of users (especially Pro users who heavily use Tokens) will trigger the limit prompt earlier than before.

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Weekly total quota remains unchanged: Guide developers to shift to offline tasks

Although the real-time quota allocation varies during the day, Anthropic emphasized that the weekly total usage limit for users remains unchanged.

Officially, developers running large-scale Token-consuming background jobs (such as large-scale code refactoring, long document analysis, etc.) are advised to try to move tasks to non-peak hours to maximize the use of their session quotas. This adjustment reflects that AI computing resources are still in a tight balance, and vendors are replacing simple "one-size-fits-all" restrictions with more refined traffic management to improve overall hardware utilization efficiency.