Claude has been on a tear in recent weeks in terms of racking up app downloads, and the strain has begun showing in its usage limits.
Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar, a Member of Technical Staff working on Claude Code, announced that the company is adjusting how 5-hour session limits are distributed for free, Pro, and Max subscribers during peak hours. The change affects weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT — users will burn through their session limits faster during those windows. Anthropic says weekly limits remain unchanged; what’s shifting is how they’re allocated across the week.
“To manage growing demand for Claude we’re adjusting our 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged,” he said in an X post. “We’ve landed a lot of efficiency wins to offset this, but ~7% of users will hit session limits they wouldn’t have before, particularly for pro tiers. If you run token-intensive background jobs, shifting them to off-peak hours will stretch your session limits further,” he added.
The timing is not a coincidence. Claude’s daily active users on iOS and Android have grown roughly 5x since October 2025, climbing from around 2 million to over 11 million by the end of February 2026. Much of that spike came after Anthropic’s public clash with the Trump administration, which briefly pushed Claude to the number one spot on Apple’s App Store, ahead of ChatGPT and Gemini. What was intended as punishment for Anthropic functioned as a marketing event.
Shihipar acknowledged the friction, noting that Anthropic has “landed a lot of efficiency wins” to offset demand — but not enough to fully absorb it. Roughly 7% of users, particularly on Pro tiers, will now hit limits they wouldn’t have encountered before. Users running token-intensive background jobs are advised to shift those to off-peak hours.
The adjustment reflects a tension Anthropic has navigated since Claude.ai’s web traffic grew nearly 300% year-over-year through February 2026: consumer growth is outpacing the infrastructure built to serve a more enterprise and developer-focused user base. Claude’s API customers — businesses and developers — already run highly automated, token-heavy workloads, and the consumer surge is landing on top of that existing load.
Shihipar framed the move as temporary, pledging continued investment in scaling and promising updates on progress. For now, the practical advice is straightforward: if you’re doing heavy lifting with Claude, do it outside peak hours.