Anthropic removes Claude Ultra’s five-hour cap for verified accounts

• Claude’s $200 Max 20x plan becomes Ultra; Max 5x becomes Max at $100, with prices unchanged, according to Anthropic’s announcement.
• Verified Ultra accounts lose the five-hour usage cap, as the follow-up announcement confirms. The rollout starts with most existing subscribers.
• Weekly capacity stays at 10x Pro, according to testingcatalog’s explanation. Removing the session cap does not increase that allowance.
• OpenAI also canceled its planned Pro 200 usage cut while announcing broader increases in its update.

Ultra’s verification check uses account and payment history; verifying a phone number at checkout does not clear the five-hour cap. Claude Code also has a billing trap: an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in the environment routes usage to API billing instead of the subscription.

The renamed tiers keep their monthly prices:

• Max 5x → Max: $100/month.
• Max 20x → Ultra: $200/month.

Existing subscriptions move automatically, with no action required. The $100 Max plan retains its five-hour cap, with 5x Pro usage both per session and per week, according to the pricing page.

Max 20x carried two different multipliers, as testingcatalog explained:

• Old Max 20x: 20x Pro’s five-hour allowance, plus 10x Pro’s weekly allowance.
• Verified Ultra: no five-hour allowance ceiling, with the same 10x Pro weekly allowance.

Anthropic’s subscriber email says the weekly cap was introduced in August 2025. The 20x name referred to the session allowance now being removed.

The company ties the removal to Claude work that increasingly runs for hours in the background. Once verified, subscribers can distribute their weekly allowance however they like, including concentrating it into longer sessions.

Removal is rolling out in stages. Newer Ultra accounts retain a temporary five-hour cap until verification finishes, and Anthropic sends an email when it is lifted.

Verification happens automatically, without a manual request. A verified account no longer displays a Current session bar under Settings > Usage, according to the Ultra help guide.

Activity across Claude on web, desktop, mobile, and Claude Code still draws from one pool. There is no fixed message count: model choice, conversation length and complexity, and file size affect how quickly the allowance is consumed, according to the pricing FAQ.

Anthropic also retains discretion to impose additional capacity restrictions, including monthly caps or model-specific and feature-specific limits. Its Ultra FAQ explicitly says uninterrupted service is not guaranteed.

The plan chart lists two additional budget lines:

• Fable: included on Max and Ultra for up to half the weekly allowance, with a separate weekly limit.
• Monthly API credits: $100 on Max and $200 on Ultra, for building on the Claude Platform.

The included monthly API credits cannot be used in Claude Code or the Claude apps, including to fund usage credits after a subscription limit is reached, according to the Claude Code guide.

OpenAI canceled the planned Pro 200 cut that koltregaskes had reported would halve the Work and Codex allowance.

The increases depend on which allowance a subscriber previously had, according to OpenAI’s updated help page:

• Pro 100 and Pro 500: twice their previous Work and Codex allowance.
• Pro 200, higher allowance: unchanged, with the planned reduction canceled.
• Pro 200, lower allowance: doubled to match the higher allowance.

OpenAI’s announcement also includes Business Premium in the doubling. Extended limits for dots remain in place for now, with dot usage counted separately from default usage.