Claude Has Two Independent Rate Limits — Here's How They Actually Work
Anthropic's Claude AI enforces two separate rolling usage limits: a 5-hour session limit based on message volume and a 7-day cumulative limit, both of which reset relative to a user's first message rather than on a fixed schedule. These limits are measured in tokens, not messages, meaning heavy tasks like pasting large code files can exhaust a session window far faster than expected. A developer discovered that Claude's browser interface quietly queries an internal usage endpoint that returns exact utilization percentages and reset timestamps for both windows. The token-based model also means Claude Opus consumes quota significantly faster than lighter models like Sonnet or Haiku. Additionally, response quality reportedly begins to degrade before the hard limit is reached, as the model's attention mechanism deprioritizes older context in very long conversations.
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