What happened
Anthropic’s Claude pricing page, read on 31 October 2026, lists two top consumer tiers: Max at $100 a month and Ultra at $200 a month. Anthropic’s help center says “the Max 20x plan is now called the Ultra plan” and that existing Max 20x subscribers move to Ultra automatically, with no price change. The change was first flagged to us by a newsletter summary of Anthropic’s announcement on X, which we could not read directly; the details below come from Anthropic’s own pricing and help pages. Neither page states the date the change took effect.
Key details
- Max ($100/month): Anthropic lists “5x Pro usage every 5 hours and every week”, Fable included “up to half your weekly limit”, and $100 a month in API credits for the Claude Platform.
- Ultra ($200/month): “No 5-hour limit”, “10x Pro usage every week”, and $200 a month in API credits, up from $100 on Max.
- Verification condition: the missing 5-hour limit applies to verified accounts only. Anthropic says it verifies Ultra accounts automatically “using factors like your account and payment history”; verifying a phone number at checkout is a separate step and does not remove the limit. A user can check under Settings > Usage: if no “Current session” bar appears, the account is verified.
- Unverified accounts: a temporary limit applies and is removed automatically once the account is verified. Anthropic does not say what that limit is or how long verification takes.
- Weekly limits remain: Ultra has a weekly cap across all models and a separate weekly cap for Fable, and Anthropic notes that “additional usage limits may apply to manage capacity”. The pricing page adds that plans are “subject to change at Anthropic’s discretion”.
Why it matters
For heavy users of Claude, the 5-hour session window was the limit most likely to interrupt long agentic or coding tasks, so removing it on the $200 tier changes how that plan can be used, as long as the account is verified and the weekly cap is not reached. What is not yet clear from Anthropic’s pages is how long verification takes for new subscribers and what the temporary limit looks like. Because the 10x figure is a weekly multiple of Pro usage, the real amount of work per week still depends on the model, chat length and file size, as Anthropic’s footnote says. This article is about Anthropic, a company that this publication uses as a tool; read it as a summary of Anthropic’s own published terms.
Disclosure: Claude, made by Anthropic, was one of the AI tools used to research and draft this article, and this article is about Anthropic’s own products. Details come from Anthropic’s pricing page and help center, read on 31 October 2026.
Sources
- Claude pricing (Anthropic) Primary source , Anthropic
- What is the Ultra plan? (Claude Help Center) Primary source , Anthropic