Anthropic pulled a fast one on us! (Opus plans LIMITED)

Anthropic silently cut 5-hour session usage on Free, Pro, and Max plans — the Max 20x tier at $200/mo is the worst hit, with no advance notice.

What changed

Around four to five days before the video, users noticed tokens burning faster during peak hours inside the 5-hour rolling window. Anthropic confirmed on X that it is "adjusting the five hour limits for free max max users" — and the creator's read is that this was a stealth rollout: "it was a feature, not a bug." API users are unaffected because they pay per token.

Who's hit

Every consumer tier: Free, Pro ($20/mo), Max, and Max 20x ($200/mo). The creator runs heavy overnight jobs on Max 20x — e.g., telling Claude to "just build up this weird idea for me" while he sleeps — and that pattern is exactly what the new caps punish.

Why Anthropic did it

The creator's theory: Anthropic is prepping its next model, Mythos, which "seems to be really really strong," and needs the GPU time for training. The plan subsidies (the gap between what you pay and what Anthropic actually serves) are being pulled back to free up compute. The opaque rate limits make it easy: unlike OpenAI, Google, and Chinese providers such as MiniMax and GLM 4.5, Anthropic never publishes exact token ceilings, so it has room to move the goalposts without a changelog entry.

What to do

Run Claude tasks during off-peak hours if you must stay on it. For coding, route to GLM 4.5 (the Chinese open-weight option featured in the previous video) or MiniMax 2.7 — "Minimax 2.7 is catching up, especially for Agentic use cases." Caveat from the creator: he tried GLM 4.5.1 via Claude Code on the day of recording and it "just [is] not running," so expect some instability on the alternatives.

Bottom line

The creator calls the lack of prior communication "kind of ridiculous" and says "now is probably the best time to switch if you haven't done so already" — while conceding that Claude is still the strongest model on the market, which is precisely why they could get away with it.