Anthropic renames Claude Max 20x to Ultra and drops its 5-hour limit, but the weekly cap stays at 10x Pro

Anthropic has renamed its two Max plans and, for the more expensive one, dropped the five-hour usage limit. Max 5x is now just Max ($100 a month) and Max 20x is now Ultra ($200 a month). Prices don't change, and existing subscribers are moved over automatically. The Claude account announced it on October 30 at 17:29 UTC:

The part people will actually notice: verified Ultra accounts no longer have a five-hour session limit, the rolling window that blocks you mid-session until it refills. The weekly limit stays, and so does the separate weekly limit for Fable. Max keeps both limits, at five times Pro's usage every five hours and every week.

What "20x" really meant

Mike Overell, who leads product for Claude subscriptions, used the announcement to explain the old name, and it's a fairly candid admission. When the top plan launched in April 2025 it had only the five-hour limit, set at 20 times Pro's, hence "Max 20x". Weekly limits came later, and for that plan they were set at 10x Pro, while the five-hour limit stayed at 20x. "I get that some new users assumed 20x applied to both limits," he wrote. "We could have done better here, and I'm sorry."

So the limit Anthropic removed is the one that was 20x. The one that stays, 10x Pro per week, was always the real ceiling on how much a heavy user could get through in a week. Ultra doesn't give you more total usage than Max 20x did. It lets you spend the same weekly allowance in fewer, longer bursts without hitting a wall every five hours. For anyone running long Claude Code sessions or agent jobs, that's a real change. For anyone hoping "no five-hour limit" meant "much more Claude", it isn't. Anthropic's help center also keeps its usual reservation that it may add "weekly and monthly caps or model and feature usage" limits at its discretion.

The verification catch

The five-hour limit goes away only for accounts Anthropic considers verified, and the Ultra help article says it decides that automatically "using factors like your account and payment history". The announcement says most existing subscribers get it starting today, and the rollout comes in stages. Newer accounts keep a temporary limit and will get an email when it's lifted. Verifying a phone number at checkout is a separate thing and doesn't count. To check your status, open Settings > Usage: if there's no "Current session" bar, your account is verified.

What else is on the pricing page

The updated pricing page lists Ultra with $200 a month in Claude Platform API credits, against $100 on Max. Those are the monthly API credits Max and Team plans got on October 7 (claimed by linking a Claude Console organization in Settings > Billing). Both Max and Ultra can use Fable for up to half of their weekly limit; on Pro, Fable is paid for with usage credits.

The change also lands in the middle of a week of complaints about Claude Code usage draining faster than expected, which Anthropic investigated and attributed mostly to heavy sessions. And it comes a day after OpenAI doubled Codex and Work limits for its Pro tiers. Codex lead Thibault Sottiaux's reply to Anthropic's post was one line long: "Better announce 28 days of reset."