Claude’s sudden surge in users is slowing it down for everyone

Following the Pentagon’s high-profile decision to blacklist Claude in favor of ChatGPT, countless users have fled OpenAI’s pioneering AI platform for Anthropic’s more principled one—and in recent weeks, the number of active users for Anthropic’s Claude has skyrocketed.

As a direct result of its sudden boost in popularity, Anthropic has determined that it must restrict usage during peak hours because the company’s server capacity can’t keep up.

It was announced by Thariq Shihipar, a member of Anthropic’s technical team, via social media post: “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. During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you’ll move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before.”

And in a comment to our colleagues at Infoworld, analyst Pareekh Jain of Pareekh Consulting explained further: “The impact is largely limited to individual users, prosumers, and small teams using Claude via subscription plans, where usage caps and throttling are expected to manage shared compute and costs.”

We generally favor Claude as our AI chatbot of choice, but these tightened restrictions during peak hours are going to be a sore spot. If you’ve switched to Claude and seem to be hitting your limits more often than you’d like, see our tips for staying within your Claude usage caps.