Alert: Claude Code Rolls Out  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hard Fork AI]] - Full Title: Alert: Claude Code Rolls Out - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/d647a34a-d2ab-4fac-9ecc-c67eb6a5c3d5 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Anthropic's New Rate Limits** - Anthropic introduced weekly rate limits for its AI platform due to high demand and misuse, affecting especially Cloud Code users. - Initially, the limits impact less than 5% but may grow as usage increases and abuses continue. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer It is official. Anthropic has rolled out and announced new rate limits, basically how much you can use the AI platform because of a specific tool and because of a specific type of person potentially Abusing their whole system. Now, today on the podcast, I want to talk about the Anthropic rate limits, what this means for other AI companies, because I don't think Anthropic's going to be the only one that has to Do this. I'm going to talk about why they have these rate limits, what the rate limits are, where I think this is going in the future, and are rate limits even going to be a thing in the future? Or are we eventually just going to get to unlimited free compute? All right, we're going to get into all of that on the podcast today. Before we do, I wanted to mention if you've ever wanted to use all of the top AI models that I mentioned on the podcast, I'd love for you to try out my platform, which is called AIbox.ai. Essentially, it allows you to try the top 40 different AI models all on one platform, Anthropic, Google, Gemini, Rock, OpenAI, everything for just $20 a month. So you don't have to have subscriptions to every single platform. There's also the ability for you to compare results side by side from different AI models and the ability for you to have a media storage that shows you everything you've ever generated In the past, the prompt you used to generate it, and help you get back to the prompt and the chat that you had to begin with. Okay, so that's cool, but let's get into what is going on with Anthropic, starting with a tweet that they put out that says, quote, we're rolling out new fresh or new weekly rate limits For CloudPro and Max in the late of August. So it's not right now, but coming soon. We estimate they'll apply to less than 5% of subscribers based on current usage. Basically, the big thing that I think is important is it's like, OK, look, this is only going to apply to like 5% of our subscribers based off of what they're seeing. The other thing that I do think is important is as more and more people are trying this, more and more people are getting familiar with these tools. I think, like give it a month or two months, and that number would have been 10% or 15% or 20%, right? Because people are using it more and more. And so I think that maybe it's 5% of subscribers today. But like, by the time this rolls out at the end of the month, it could be impacting a little bit more. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d6ffb6f7-27e5-4ff9-99b1-469aefab9e9a)) - **AI Box's Cloud Code Use** - AI Box replaced their designer with Anthropic's Cloud Code, significantly boosting coding productivity. - They spend around $100 every few days on Cloud Code due to its high usage in their projects. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Anyways, all this to say, the 5%, I don't think is as small as you'd think it'll get bigger but anyways this is what they said specifically clod code so clod code for those who are unaware Is basically anthropics coding platform it ties into your code base i use it ai box it ties into our back end and our front end we tell it how you know we we would like it to code something It looks at all of our code precedent so it designs things that look similar to our current design styles. We basically, if I'm being 100% honest, have replaced our designer over AIbox with this because it's able to help a lot with the code. Now, you do need, in my opinion, a talented coder to help give it directions and to understand what's going on. You have to understand the code base you're prompting against the back end and the front end and everything else. But basically, if you understand what you're doing, you can get a 10x on what you're able to do with Cloud Code as a developer. So they said that Cloud Code has seen unprecedented demand. They said, especially as part of our max plans, basically. So this is the other thing with it. I was spending over at AI Box, we were spending like $100 every couple of days because we're just using, getting so much usage out of Cloud Code. And then they unveiled this thing called the max plan, which was basically unlimited usage for $200 a month. Who could say no, we're already spending so much money every few days that we're like, Oh, yeah, we're like, this is a no brainer. So we sign up for that. It's kind of tricky. You actually have to message that I think they're like support or you got to do some jump through a couple hoops. But basically, once you get it, it saved us a ton of money. Now, evidently, all the money we saved, they're not happy about. And they said, we'll continue to support this growth while we work on making Cloud Code even better. But for now, we need to make some changes. Some of the biggest Cloud Code fans are running it continuously in the back end 24-7. All right, I have an example of one person that is doing this. They said, these are remarkable and we want to enable them, but few outlying cases are very costly to support. ([Time 0:02:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c70b7af-3890-4a25-ae33-da31e4c6bd0b)) - **Abuse Drives Limits Enforcement** - Some users abuse the $200 unlimited plans by running 24/7 or reselling accounts, leading to unsustainable costs for Anthropic. - To protect the system and other users, Anthropic must enforce new limits and restrict misuse. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer For example, one user consumed tens of thousands of model usage on a $200 plan, right? So you're spending 30 grand, getting 30 grand worth of compute for $20. I thought, you know, we're probably saving a couple thousand dollars a month going like from 2000 to 200. Now I'm thrilled. Well, it sounds like there's people going from 20,000 or 40,000 to 200. So evidently, this isn't profitable for them. And I know we can all complain about that in particular. It's profits profit. They can't bleed 40 grand a month. All right. They said in other cases, a small number of users are violating our users policies by sharing and reselling accounts. This impacts capability for all cloud users and we're taking appropriate actions to stop it. OK, this one makes perfect sense. Obviously, if you're getting an account for 200 bucks and selling to a ton of people, so tons of people can use it all at once, that should be against the rules. You got to use an API if you want to resell their stuff. And this is for individual users. So I'm not really I'm not mad about that and it makes perfect business sense they said from august 28th we'll introduce new weekly limits so this is the new thing that they're having they Basically had some limits in the past and while some people are complaining about this i'm honestly just happy that they've clarified what this what like what the rate limits are because Um up until now it's been very opaque and hard to even understand so they're now going to have these new weekly limits before they just kind of had, I believe, like hourly limits or total Limits or monthly limits. Now it's weekly. They say that will mitigate these problems while impacting as few customers as possible. We'll also support max plan users by buying additional usage at standard API rates if they ([Time 0:03:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/955230cf-248c-43c4-82b7-77c841971634)) - **Weekly Limits and Flexible Pricing** - Anthropic introduces weekly rate limits to replace vague previous limits, aiming to impact as few customers as possible. - Users can opt to buy additional usage at standard API rates once limits are reached, providing flexibility. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Choose to. Okay, now this is the part that gets a little bit crazy and is reminding a lot of people of basically the drama that happened with Cursor earlier in the month where they had a similar kind Of like unlimited plan. Cursor was, in my opinion, and they apologized, but I think it was shady. They switched so that basically if you had a credit card on file with Cursor, you had their unlimited plan. They like switched without really telling a lot of people so that they didn't have an unlimited plan anymore, right? It was rate limited. But if you went over the rate limits, they automatically billed you for the extra usage, which I'm like, come on. You got to give people a warning. You have to opt in. So people were just like waking up at the end of the month and they had to have like a $2,000 cursor bill when they're on the $20 a month plan. And they're like, what? So basically, I'm hoping Anthropik handles it better because it says if they choose to. So it seems like this is an opt in thing, right? Basically, it's going to say you've reached your weekly limit. Do you want to just use like the API and continue but you're going to just have to like pay a la carte for your usage? I think a lot of people are going to say yes, because basically as of last month, I was spending, you know, thousands of dollars, a couple hundred bucks every, every, every few days. I mean, it does make sense. And hopefully it's not going to be expensive. And hopefully it's like, you don't hit that rate limit maybe every day or all the time. It's just at times when you have like a big project or a big deadline or a big push, and you're really cranking on usage, then you could go over a little bit and make it happen without, because What's the alternative? The alternative is to like make multiple cloud code accounts. So you don't really want to have to like max out one account, switch to the next account, max out that account, switch to the next. ([Time 0:05:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b19affb5-98c4-4171-8dba-0a65a7fabb51)) - **Cloud Code 24/7 Anecdote** - McKay Wrigley ran Cloud Code 24/7, creating a self-running "Cloudputer" project. - This intense usage exemplifies the kind of high-demand user Anthropic's limits aim to manage. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer I hope you enjoyed it. Now this is an example of someone that actually was doing the 24-7 CloudCode run. So it's McKay Wrigley. He said he said sorry about that and he basically reshared one of his projects that he had posted earlier this month. He said so I gave CloudCode a Mac mini and it's called Cloudputer. It runs 24-7 and it's allowed to do whatever it wants it's in complete control of the computer he has a two-minute demo where it's just like running it doing iterating on tons of things It's trying tons of different projects basically he's one of those use cases potentially I'm not sure like how much code he's actually spitting out or how hard he can push it but basically It's running 24-7 so he is one of those 24-7 examples and I think he he gets a place in the in the books for legendary someone said and of course everyone is suddenly going to be in that five Percent right so that's kind of what i was getting at at the beginning was uh they say it's only in effect five percent of users and i'm like and somehow everybody's in the top five percent Congratulations you guys are all incredible cracked um someone said rug pulls are a weekly occurrence now i thought that was hilarious also i love i love complaining about this because Like people are getting you're getting so much bang for your buck so i love to call it a rug pull as i'm literally like getting thousands of dollars of usage for 200 bucks a month um i think It's kind of funny it ([Time 0:08:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b130fb5d-8b46-4ea0-9f28-cbe2d1a6e44a)) - **Opaque Usage Measurement** - Anthropic measures usage in hourly ranges rather than tokens, with wide variances depending on code base size and complexity. - The most expensive plans offer up to 40 hours weekly on their top model, but actual usage depends heavily on user needs. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Entails. So based off of this whole announcement, Anthropic has a status page that shows... Okay, so another reason why I believe this is happening, there's a status page over that Anthropic has, and it's basically showing the outages. And you can also see that based off of the last, I think the last seven times that Claude Code had an outage, the last seven times were literally in the last month. So they've had seven outages in the last month. Obviously, this thing is getting run up to quite a high degree. So it's, you know, they felt like they had to do something about this all right what are the actual limits okay anthropic commented on the story basically and they said that um most pro Users can expect to get about 20 to 40 hours of sonnet 4 sonnet 4 isn't necessarily their their best so 40 to 80 hours uh that's their weekly limit which sounds like a lot um that is just pro Users. And of course, they're using like a lower model, because it's a lower tier, the pro users. Okay, but what are the really what I'm interested in is the max, because that's the plan that I'm on. But I guess everyone has different plans. So I'll shout them all out. If you're on their $100 a month max plan, you can get 40 140 to 280 of sonnet but that's not what what people care about people really care about the opus 4 i think a lot because that's technically Their best model some people say it doesn't code as good whatever i won't get into the the argument there but basically their top model you get 15 to 35 hours a week of opus pro now if you're Working 40 hours a week you could almost use it the whole time almost although 15 to 35 is kind of a big range and so if it's the 15 end of the 40 hours you're kind of doomed um also we know that Coders do not work 40 hours a week they work 80 because they're crazy um but also if you are on there but that's a hundred dollar a month plan okay if you're on the 200 a month plan max plan, Which is what our company AI box has for our developers, you get about 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet four. But more importantly, you get 24 to 40 hours of Opus four. So basically you get 40 hours technically. And I suspect we'll be buying the API additional credits for a bunch of our developers that want to do more than 40 hours or 24 hours. I mean, really, it depends how much code you're spitting out. But in any case, the company has noted that usage is also going to vary based off of your code base size and other factors, right? So if you have a small code base, much faster, big code base, big context, Windows that is taking in and out data. So it's going to cost you a lot more. I have a bad feeling that AI Box's massive code base is going to doom us into the big code base bucket, but whatever. It's also not super clear how Anthropik is measuring their usage, right? So they claim that $200 a month plan has about 20X more usage than the pro plan. They're also saying in hours, but they're giving really wide ranges of hours. This isn't very clear. It's not like an X amount of tokens. They're like, look, you get 40 ([Time 0:10:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/24dbabae-3566-461e-bfb1-2cbe774844b0)) - **Industry Trend Toward Rate Limits** - Rate limits are an industry-wide trend as AI companies seek profitability without alienating power users. - Anthropic aims to balance broad access with financial sustainability to retain users and grow ecosystem. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Like I mentioned, Cursor did this and they had a bunch of drama about it. They apologized. We also had Replit make some similar pricing changes. So it seems like people are all, it seems like this is kind of an industry trend. And I think we're going to see a lot more companies as it becomes less and less profitable. Companies are going to try to thread the needle of not making too many of their users upset, becoming profitable. You also could use like, you know, basically a user that has a $200 a month plan, but maybe only uses $100 worth of credits. They're, you know, they're offsetting the loss of someone that might be using like $250 worth of credits a month. And so I think Anthropic wants to have as many users as possible. They don't want to like curb stomp all of the hopes and dreams of their power users either, because if those people go other places, you know, it just makes their whole ecosystem get used Less. So they like they want to keep as many ([Time 0:14:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd3e51e9-cf6f-4a9c-bf2f-1876df519107))