Anthropic began removing Claude’s rolling five-hour usage cutoff for verified Ultra subscribers on October 30, aiming to help users who frequently hit the limit work through longer sessions. The change is rolling out to most existing subscribers.

Alongside the change, Anthropic renamed Max 5x to Max and Max 20x to Ultra. Their prices remain $100 and $200 per month, respectively, and existing subscribers transition automatically.

Max includes five times Pro’s usage across five-hour and weekly periods, while Ultra offers ten times Pro’s weekly allowance. Both plans include priority access and early access to advanced features.

Removing Ultra’s five-hour cutoff does not increase its total included usage: the weekly allowance remains unchanged, and Claude chats across web, desktop and mobile count toward the same cap as Claude Code sessions. Fable has a separate weekly limit.

The change is most useful for intensive bursts of work, such as long coding sessions or processing large documents. Users may now use their weekly allowance faster, and anyone who exhausts it must wait for the weekly reset or enable extra usage credits billed at standard API rates.

Anthropic verifies Ultra accounts automatically using account and payment history, without an application form. Newer subscribers face a temporary five-hour limit until verified; confirming a phone number at checkout does not remove it, and Anthropic says it will email users when their limits are lifted.

Subscribers can check verification under Settings > Usage: a verified account has no “Current session” bar.

Since October, Max and Ultra subscriptions have included $100 and $200 in monthly Claude Platform API credits, respectively. Ultra is monthly-only, and its $200 web price may differ in mobile apps.

Pro costs $20 per month and includes Opus 5.5, but not Fable, which requires usage credits. Max and Ultra include Fable usage up to half of its weekly limit.

The changes appear designed to clarify Claude’s premium tiers and compete for heavy users as pricing and usage allowances become a focus in the AI assistant market; Anthropic also cites model-based misuse detection as part of its safety efforts.

The article notes that OpenAI has also raised usage limits for some subscribers and reversed two proposed pricing changes after objections from customers and developers.