On October 30, Anthropic reshuffled the two premium tiers of its Claude subscription: the former Max 5x is now Max, and the former Max 20x is now Ultra. Prices are unchanged at $100 and $200 per month, and existing subscribers do not need to do anything.
Beyond the new names, the rules for Ultra have changed too. Starting that day, verified Ultra accounts are no longer subject to the 5-hour usage limit. The change reaches most existing subscribers first, and the weekly usage cap stays where it was.
What changed and what did not
The old "20x" label was a frequent source of confusion. According to Anthropic's page, the multiplier referred to usage within the 5-hour window, while the weekly total is 10 times that of Pro, and after the rename the weekly allowance is still 10x. In other words, what Ultra users gain is freedom of pacing: they are no longer stopped by a window that resets every 5 hours and can burn through a large chunk of their allowance in a single day. The total amount has not increased.
A few specifics:
- Verification is automatic. Anthropic judges from signals such as the account and payment history, with no forms or ID to submit. Verifying a phone number at checkout does not by itself lift the limit.
- New accounts keep a temporary 5-hour limit to guard against fraud and abuse, and an email arrives when it is lifted. Anthropic has not said how long the wait is or which signals it checks.
- Under Settings → Usage, a verified Ultra account no longer shows the "Current session" progress bar, which is a way to tell whether your limit has been lifted.
- The allowance is shared between Claude and Claude Code. Coding draws from the same pool as chat, so heavy use early in the week may leave too little before the weekly reset.
Pro ($20 a month) and the free tier are unaffected and still have both a 5-hour and a weekly limit. The renamed Max also still has 5-hour and weekly allowances that are each 5 times those of Pro.
How this tier got here
Put together, the past year of changes to Claude's premium tier shows that usage rules have been a recurring point of dispute.
In June, a user sued Anthropic, alleging that the usage multiples advertised for the Max plans did not match reality; the actual multiple cited in the suit was roughly 6 to 8 times, a claim that comes only from the plaintiff and that Anthropic has not accepted. Claude Code's weekly limits were adjusted afterward as well. Anthropic said it raised them by 25%, while some developers who ran the numbers under the new basis concluded they actually had less usable capacity.
The rename removes the "20x" figure that people kept measuring against, and replaces it with two plainer commitments: no 5-hour window, and a weekly allowance of 10 times Pro. For heavy users, the most common frustration is being cut off midway through work by the 5-hour window, and that layer has now been loosened.
Rivals added capacity the same week
OpenAI also moved on its premium tiers this week. It announced that ChatGPT Pro's allowance is doubling, and that Codex usage limits on the Pro and Business Premium tiers are doubling as well. Both companies are adding value at roughly the $200 price point, competing for developers and power users willing to pay a high monthly fee.
The two approaches differ. OpenAI is simply adding volume, while Anthropic is keeping the weekly total and loosening the time window. For someone who codes intensively for a few hours each day, Anthropic's approach fits real usage habits better; for someone who works at high intensity evenly across the week, the weekly cap is the true ceiling, and it has not moved.
"starting today with most existing subscribers"
Anthropic has not given a timeline for when the remaining subscribers will be covered.
Sources: Claude's official account announcement, used to verify plan names, prices and the change to the 5-hour limit; Windows Report, CocoLoop and DataStudios, used to cross-check the weekly multiples and account verification rules.