Anthropic renames Claude Max plans to Ultra, drops the five-hour limit for verified accounts

What happened

Anthropic renamed its two highest Claude subscription tiers on October 31, 2026. The $100-a-month plan previously called Max 5x is now simply Max. The $200 plan previously called Max 20x is now Ultra. The company announced the changes in a post on X, relayed by Techmeme, saying existing subscribers do not need to do anything and prices stay the same.

TNW reported the change on November 1, and the Claude Help Center has been updated with the new plan names. The Help Center page for the Ultra plan describes it as offering '10 times the Pro plan's usage every week' and 'no five-hour limit for verified accounts.' That language is new: the old Max 20x page referred to a five-hour rolling window and did not distinguish between verified and unverified accounts.

What the removal of the five-hour limit means

The five-hour limit has been a persistent frustration for heavy Claude users. It measured usage from the start of a session: once a user had been active for five hours (not five hours of billing time, five hours of elapsed wall clock since the first message), the plan hit a throttling boundary and the user had to wait for the window to reset.

For verified Ultra accounts, that rolling window is gone. A user can start a long coding task in Claude Code, walk away for lunch, come back, and keep working without the session clock running uninterrupted. The practical effect is most visible for Claude Code users who run hours-long coding sessions, or researchers who work through large documents and iterative analysis without closing the chat.

But the removal is not unlimited. The weekly usage cap — ten times the Pro plan's allowance — has not changed. A verified Ultra subscriber who uses the full weekly allocation in a single day is still stopped until the weekly reset. There is also a separate weekly limit for Claude Fable, Anthropic's top model, which uses a different accounting pool. Anthropic says it may apply 'additional limits for capacity and fair access' at its discretion.

The verification requirement

The five-hour limit removal applies only to verified accounts. Anthropic says most existing subscribers already qualify. New accounts keep a temporary limit until verification completes automatically based on account and payment history. Users can check their status in Settings under Usage: a verified account does not display a 'Current session' bar.

A phone number confirmation at checkout is a separate step and does not itself lift the temporary cap. The company sends an email when the limit is removed. For new subscribers who want the session-limit freedom immediately, the verification delay is the current friction point.

Is anything else changing?

The renamed plans carry the same benefits as before. Max ($100) includes 5x Pro usage every five hours and every week, $100 a month in API credits, and Fable access for up to half the weekly limit. Ultra ($200) includes 10x Pro weekly usage, $200 a month in API credits, and Fable access for up to half the weekly limit. The API credits are a new addition: Max got $100 in API credits and Ultra got $200. Priority access at high traffic times and early access to new features are listed for both plans.

European pricing remains at 90 euros for Max and 180 euros for Ultra. Mobile pricing may differ by app platform. The plans are available for web subscriptions at the listed prices. Claude Pro remains at $17 a month with an annual subscription or $20 monthly.

The competitive context

The timing is notable. OpenAI has been competing aggressively on pricing and features: GPT-6.1 Terra launched at lower pricing, and OpenAI has been bundling more usage into its Plus plan. Anthropic's removal of the five-hour session cap on its most expensive plan directly addresses a pain point that its heaviest users — developers and researchers — have raised publicly. It does not change the total amount of work per week, but it changes the shape of access, which for many users is more important.

Claude Code users in particular have long complained about the session limit, as coding work is naturally variable in pace. A user who spends an hour reading documentation without sending a prompt, then codes intensively for two hours, could hit the session cap at an arbitrary point. Removing the rolling window for verified accounts effectively prioritizes the users Anthropic most wants to retain: power users who subscribe to the highest tier and use Claude for sustained work.

Caveats

Our account relies on Anthropic's public announcement on X, the Claude Help Center page for the Ultra plan, and reporting from TNW, AI Primer, and AI Weekly. Anthropic has not published a blog post about the changes; the primary announcement was a social media post. The weekly limit is expressed as '10 times the Pro plan's usage,' which is an allowance comparison rather than a fixed message count — actual throughput varies by model, conversation length, files, features, and effort settings. The separate Fable weekly limit also remains, and Anthropic can apply additional capacity-management limits at any time.