Anthropic doubles Claude Code limits, thanks to a deal with SpaceX

Instead of downgrading its most affordable Claude subscription plan by dropping access to Claude Code, Anthropic has instead doubled Claude Code usage rates for subscribers, starting today. All it took was an eyebrow-raising alliance with an unlikely partner.

On day one of the Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco, Anthropic announced it had struck a deal with SpaceX that will “substantially increase” Anthropic’s computing capacity.

Thanks to the deal, Anthropic says it will double Claude Code five-hour usage limits for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, while also raising pay-per-token API rate limits for Claude’s powerful Opus models. No mention was made of weekly Claude Code limits. I’ve reached out to Anthropic for more details.

Anthropic also said it would lift peak-hour usage limits for Claude Pro and Max accounts, which Anthropic imposed in late March.

In its deal with SpaceX, Anthropic will get access to all the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, including use of more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Anthropic—who also struck computing capacity deals with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—said it was also interested in SpaceX’s orbital AI compute capacity.

The Anthropic–SpaceX partnership is surprising in that Elon Musk, who owns a commanding 42 percent stake in SpaceX, has been outspoken in his criticism of Anthropic, which he previously called “misanthropic and evil.” But in an about-face social media post on Wednesday, Musk posted that he was “impressed” after recent meetings with Anthropic staffers. “No one set off my evil detector,” he wrote.

Anthropic, meanwhile, has been straining to meet capacity demands, with the company recently mulling the idea of dropping Claude Code access from its $20-a-month Claude Pro plan.

That hasn’t actually happened yet, but an Anthropic exec recently admitted that the company’s consumer plans weren’t built for token-hungry agentic tools like Claude Code and Cowork. Anthropic’s deal with SpaceX should give it much-needed breathing room as it works to bridge the gap between what its Claude Pro and Max plans promise and what the company’s computing capacity actually allows.

But whether Anthropic’s SpaceX alliance will be a long-term solution to its capacity woes—not to mention the ever-shifting usage limits Pro and Max users must contend with—remains to be seen.