Claude drops the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts
Max 20x becomes Ultra, Max 5x becomes Max, and the prices stay where they were.
Anthropic is removing the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts, the Claude account posted, starting the same day with most existing subscribers. The plan names changed with it. Max 5x is now just Max, Max 20x is now Ultra, and the prices are unchanged at $100 and $200 a month. Existing subscribers do not have to do anything.
We’re also removing the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts, starting today with most existing subscribers.
The carve out is for new accounts. Those keep a temporary limit until they are verified, which the post says helps prevent fraud and abuse, and users get an email when the limit comes off. Weekly limits remain unchanged.
Theo quoted the removal line and replied "Huge!!!"
What actually changes
The 5-hour window is the rolling session budget that resets several times a day. It is the one that bites when you start a long agent run in the morning and hit a wall at lunch, and it is the reason people time their heavy work. Taking it off a verified Ultra account means the pacing inside a single day stops being a thing you plan around.
The weekly ceiling is the one that still governs total throughput, and Anthropic explicitly left it alone. So this is not more capacity, it is the same capacity with fewer walls inside it. If you were running out of weekly quota by Thursday, you will still run out of weekly quota by Thursday. If you were running out at 2pm and waiting until 4pm, that part is gone.
That distinction matters more now than it would have a year ago, because the pattern a lot of people have settled into is parallel agents rather than one chat at a time. Several threads in several worktrees burn a session budget in bursts, not evenly, and bursts are exactly what a 5-hour rolling window punishes. Spreading the same weekly allowance across fewer, bigger bursts is a real workflow change even though the total is identical.
The open question
Nobody in the sources has posted numbers on what heavy use looks like under the new setup, so how quickly an unconstrained day eats the weekly ceiling is not yet known. It is also worth remembering that consumption is not only a function of how much you ask for. Theo reported earlier that Anthropic's Agents SDK drained his 5-hour limits faster than Claude Code did, which is the sort of thing that shows up as a surprise at the weekly boundary instead of the daily one.
For working engineers, the practical read is simple. Day-level rationing is over for verified Ultra, week-level rationing is not, and the pressure just moved one level up.
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