Episode Details

Good day %%first_name%%. Anthropic raised Claude Code's weekly limits by twenty-five percent yesterday, and a great many developers woke up with less headroom than they had the day before. Both of those things are true, which is the whole story. Also today: Microsoft's AI chief wrote an essay about whether Claude has feelings, Cloudflare finally let the web say no to training without saying no to Google, and the machines have started quoting each other.

Anthropic Raised Your Limits and You Got Less

Anthropic Support

What happened: A promotion that lifted Claude Code's weekly usage limits by 50% ran from May 13 to September 13. On September 14 it ended, and Anthropic made a smaller slice of it permanent: standard weekly limits are now 25% above the pre-promotion baseline for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans. BleepingComputer ran the arithmetic the announcement didn't: measured against what you had on September 13, that is a cut of about 17%.

Why it matters: If you have been leaning on Claude Code for daily work since the spring, the number you learned to plan around is gone. Nothing about your plan or your bill changed — only the ceiling did, quietly, on a Monday. The practical lesson is that any usage allowance attached to the word “promotion” is a loan, not a raise.

What everyone's saying: Developers noticed immediately, and the framing is what stung rather than the number. “A cut dressed as an increase” became the shorthand across the coverage and the Claude subreddits, because 25% and 17% describe the same event from two different starting lines and the announcement only picked one.

My read between the lines: Anthropic did the honest thing in the support article — the dates are all there, the word “promotion” is right at the top, and “we know many of you found the extra usage helpful” is about as close to an apology as a rate limit ever gets. They just led with the comparison that flattered them. Every company does this. The difference is that Anthropic's customers are people who compute percentages for a living.

📖 Further reading: Claude Is Burning Through Your Limit Faster Than Ever. Anthropic Won't Tell You Why. — the ceiling just dropped 17%, so the habits that stretch it are worth more this week than they were last week.

The fastest way to survive a smaller usage allowance is to stop spending it on work that was never yours to do. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in your Slack — and Microsoft Teams — and wires into more than 3,000 tools, so the report, the dashboard, the campaign brief and the throwaway script all get handled in the channel where you already asked for them. Not a chatbot you prompt, a coworker you delegate to. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

Microsoft's AI Chief Says Claude Feels Too Much

Axios

What happened: Mustafa Suleyman, who runs Microsoft AI and co-founded Google DeepMind, published an essay Wednesday titled “A warning about ‘model welfare’” arguing that Anthropic's approach to training Claude could have a “disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity.” His target is Claude's constitution,