Anthropic renames $200 Claude plan to Ultra, lifts 5-hour limit for verified users

Anthropic has renamed its $200 monthly Claude subscription Ultra and removed the 5-hour usage limit for verified accounts, according to Theo, a software commentator who covered the change on his t3.gg channel. Theo says it is the same plan previously called 20x. Newer accounts keep a temporary 5-hour limit until they are verified. Anthropic said most existing subscribers would have the limit removed starting the day of the announcement, with an email sent when it happens. The plan lineup is now free, Pro at $20 a month, Max at $100, and Ultra at $200.

The rename is meant to correct a naming problem. According to Theo, Mike, who leads product for Claude subscriptions, wrote that Max 20x launched in April 2025 with only a 5-hour limit, which gave 20 times the Pro plan's amount within those five hours. When a weekly limit was added, it was set at 10 times Pro. Many people assumed the 20x multiplier applied to both limits, and Mike personally apologized for the confusion. Theo says Anthropic describes the rename as making clear that the 5x and 20x labels referred only to the 5-hour limit.

In Theo's account, the 5-hour window is a compute-management tool. Subscriptions let users consume far more than they would pay for at API prices. The problem, Theo argues, is timing: if a user spends a whole week's allowance at peak hours, the compute Anthropic wants to sell during the workday runs short. Theo said he checked T3 Code's analytics and found prompting peaks between 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. Pacific on weekdays, with a lull from 6:00 p.m. to around midnight and a roughly 2x gap between the lowest and highest hours. A 5-hour cap limits how much of a weekly allowance a user can burn during a peak window. Theo said the limit also helps users avoid accidentally exhausting their subscription.

Verification is the part Theo found least clear. He said Anthropic removes the limit automatically once an account is verified, so no action is required, and that adding a phone number at checkout is a separate step that does not remove it. To check, users can open settings and then usage: if no current session bar appears, the account is verified. Theo said the company has been vague about what verification involves. He offered an explanation for the strictness: in his view, distillation, where outside labs collect Claude responses to train competing models, is one of Anthropic's biggest problems, and cheap subscriptions are an attractive source of those responses. Anthropic's own stated reason, as Theo relayed it, is preventing fraud and abuse. The post doesn't say how verification is performed.

The change does not cover every subscriber. Theo said the doubled 5-hour limits Anthropic gave Claude Code after a compute deal with SpaceX in May do not extend to apps that use the Agent SDK, which he said cuts those limits in half. He also said $20 and $100 subscribers still have worse 5-hour limits than Ultra customers. Theo said T3 Code was affected: a user reported on an Anthropic repository that T3 Code uses about 1.8 times more of the 5-hour window per token than the interactive CLI, and Theo said his own calculations confirmed it. He said he has been working with Anthropic on a fix that changes the entry point field T3 Code sends, so its limits are drawn the way Claude Code's are. Theo said he had semi-solid permission to merge the change and that it would take effect once the release goes out. He also said he cannot be held responsible for any account bans that might result from such configurations.