Claude’s sudden surge in users is slowing it down for everyone A victim of its own success, Anthropic is tightening Claude's 5-hour session limits during peak weekday hours for free, Pro, and Max subscribers. 31, 2026 PDT 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.” 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.— Thariq (@trq212) March 26, 2026 And in a 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. This article originally appeared on our sister publication M3 and was translated and localized from Swedish.