Claude Users Say Tokens Are Disappearing Too Fast. Anthropic Isn’t Saying Much.

You’re reading an issue of "The AI Economy," my newsletter exploring the forces shaping the AI era—tracking how AI is rewriting business, work, technology, and culture. Subscribe to get expert insights and curated updates delivered straight to your inbox.

The more I think about it, the more I see rate-limit toggling by Anthropic and its peers as similar to the era before unlimited talk, text, and data on our smartphones. Back then, we scrambled to tell people to contact us outside peak hours so we wouldn’t use all of our allotted monthly minutes. This appears to be the new reality of AI use—at least until token efficiency improves—but it’s getting off to a rocky start.

Days after its surprise announcement that users would see faster token consumption during peak hours (5 am to 11 am PT on weekdays), Anthropic is facing increased backlash. It’s not specifically about the lack of communication, though. Rather, it’s about users complaining that the company’s rate-limit policy is too aggressive—and a bug may be to blame.

Reports have been surfacing on social media over the past several days, with Claude users upset about the new usage limits. One user on X claimed they found themselves in “four-hour cooldown jail” after simply typing “Hello Claude.” Similarly, another user posted on Reddit that the AI chatbot consumed 13 percent of their entire session just for “hello”. Other users are asking how to avoid session limits after two messages or why there’s been such performance degradation with Claude Code.

Anthropic acknowledged the issue on Monday, with Lydia Hallie, a member of its technical staff, saying on X that her team is “actively investigating” and that it’s a “top priority.” The next day, she posted that Anthropic “shipped some fixes on the Claude Code side” to help, but the company is continuing to see what else can be done. Efforts by The AI Economy to reach Anthropic for comment went unanswered.

Despite this, complaints continue to be shared on the r/Anthropic subreddit. One customer is demanding answers from Anthropic, saying it’s not about tokens, but “about transparency.” “Are these new usage limits behaving as intended? Is this a permanent change in how limits are calculated? Or is this actually a bug?” user No_Western_8578 asks before eventually concluding with “A vague ‘we are investigating was fine on day one. By day three, it starts to feel like a lack of respect for the users who fund the product. We do not need perfection. We need clarity.”

To say that Anthropic has its hands full at the moment is probably putting it mildly. Not only does it face this uproar, but it’s also in crisis mode, trying to mitigate the damage caused by accidentally posting the source code for its popular Claude Code tool online. In a statement to CNET, the company states the cause was human error and that “no sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed.” Nevertheless, the exposure gives the public a rare look under the hood.

In any event, hopefully, once Anthropic conducts its post-mortem, it will be more forthcoming about what caused this rate limit issue, because it’s less about people being able to vibe code. There are far greater implications, such as how this affects businesses that are now dependent on AI to transform their workforce productivity. And Anthropic isn’t the only one that has to learn from this—OpenAI boldly proclaimed last week that it was removing usage limits for its Claude Code competitor, Codex. How long will the company be able to absorb the costs before it reinstates token usage rates?

But if there’s something for AI companies to take away from all of this, it’s that customers really want more communication about what’s going on. As one Redditor puts it: “Token usage without any sense of transparency just makes zero sense. At least tell us what’s going on instead of silently gaslighting us to believe everything’s normal.”

Featured Image: An AI-generated cartoon depicting developers asking for more tokens from AI. Credit: ChatGPT