Anthropic announces 25% more quota on Claude Code. In fact, you lose 17%.

Late Saturday afternoon, Anthropic's developers' X account published some good news: "Starting September 14, we are permanently increasing Claude Code's standard weekly limits by 25% for the per-user billed Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans." An increase, permanent on top of that, we'll take it.

Except that starting September 14, you'll have 17% LESS than today.

We all know the principle. We just weren't expecting to see it in the AI aisle.

The calculation takes three lines

First, two words about what a weekly limit is, because that's where everything is. It's the amount of work you can ask Claude Code to do over a week before it stops and tells you to come back later. You pay for a subscription, but you don't have a tap running full blast.

Let's call the official limit 100, the one written in the terms.

Since May 13, Anthropic has been offering a temporary 50% extension. So everyone is running at 150. This extension was supposed to stop, and it was extended several times over the summer. Four months at 150, and it starts to look like a normal rate.

On September 14, the extension disappears and the permanent 25% increase takes its place. You go to 125.

From 150 to 125, one sixth is missing. There are your famous 17%.

The blue bar is your current week. The orange one is in two weeks.

The most interesting part: Anthropic didn't hide it

Where it gets juicy is that the reduction was written in black and white. In the second message in the thread: "Compared with today, this represents a 17% reduction in Claude Code's weekly limits."

And this second message wasn't added the next day under pressure. It went out a quarter of a second after the first. You can check it yourself, without taking anyone's word for it: a post's ID on X contains the exact time it was sent. The first message is dated 16 h 47 min 23.947 s, the second 16 h 47 min 24.198 s. Two hundred and fifty thousandths of a second. So both had been written in advance, together.

Except that on X, what people see scrolling through their feed is the first message. You have to click to open the second one. So in everyone's feed, there was only one sentence, and that sentence said plus 25%.

Readers did the calculation themselves and attached a community note to the main message, that little box X adds below a post when readers think it's missing a piece. Getting annotated by your own customers, that stings.

Okay, and concretely?

Nothing changes before September 14, you keep your 150 until then. After that you'll hit the ceiling earlier in the week. Will it really change anything? We'll see in practice. But if you're the kind of person who starts three Claude Code sessions in parallel like me, I think we'll feel it. Those who watch their remaining percentage in their statusline all day already know exactly what I'm talking about.

On the substance, I'm not outraged. A promotion ending is a promotion ending, nobody promised me I'd run at 150 until the end of time, and the official limit really is increasing. What annoys me is the staging: putting the increase in the shop window and the decrease in the back room, while knowing perfectly well which of the two will be read.

A "+25%" on a packet smaller than the one before, we've all learned to spot that at the supermarket. We're going to have to learn to spot it at AI vendors too!

The fact remains that the real issue is elsewhere: being blocked in the middle of development is unacceptable. We're going to have to slowly find ourselves a backup option for the weeks when the quota hits zero before Friday. Z.ai with its GLM-5.3, which plugs directly into Claude Code in place of Anthropic's model, might do the trick. To be tested.

Sources

• ClaudeDevs on X: the announcement of 25%, August 29, 2026
• ClaudeDevs on X: the second message in the thread, August 29, 2026, the recognition of 17% and the promise of more visibility
• BleepingComputer: Anthropic is cutting Claude Code's current weekly limits by 17%, August 29, 2026, the text of the announcement, the dates and the calculation
• Notebookcheck: Anthropic announces a 25% increase to Claude Code limits, but there's a 17% catch, August 29, 2026, the increase since May 13, its extensions and the community note