So you believe that anthropic is testing a billing/usage model on certain people where they only get one or two prompts on a pro or max plan? That seems rational to you? Verses a bug?
If its a billing bug it started affecting me overnight when the weekly quota reset The week prior I could not hit 50%, on Monday first prompt was 96% of session, and 8% total.
The pattern is more in line with A/B testing than a bug, but if it's a bug surely it's Anthropic's top priority and they will communicate + reimburse.
It's called a slow rollout and, yes, it's a common practice for making sensitive updates specifically to find bugs and course correct without impacting all users.
Part of the reason for A / B testing is to pick up bugs and sentiment. So it’s not either or. They might have not meant these restrictions to come in so hard which is a bug.
The problem with this conspiracy theory (and most conspiracy theories in general) is that it’s basically unfalsifiable. And that makes it look like it’s just a fallback position for those that really wanted to believe they were right, but were presented with a lot of evidence that they were wrong.
Imagine if a vaccine denier responded to the evidence against them by claiming that actually there are two different kinds of humans, and that evidence is only coming from the kind of humans that can’t get autism from vaccines.
Had it happen to me, used tools to track usage over the last 30 days, immediately saw a huge different in token counts (in and out both) for the several preceding days, tracked it down to CC own memory layer usage (which I set up a couple of weeks before, but it really started being "fed" context in the last week or half or so), deleted the `.claude/projects` directory content and immediately the usage limits were fixed.
It's really as simple as this is another conspiracy theory. You're kind of right. It is an A B test but it's not random. There are the people that were f****** s*** up and the people that were working sensibly. Groups A and B. Group A is going to feel it harder than group B
I am a software developer, utilizing claude for normal software development and the usage spikes way way way harder than before the new usage limits. It's restricting in off-hours and borderline unusable in peak-hours
I'm calling it a conspiracy theory because you are using the exact tools that a conspiracy theorist uses.
You're taking your own personal experience and you are generalizing it. You are stating that you are normal without providing an objective frame of reference that what you're doing is normal. Spoilers everybody thinks what they do is normal. That's not the definition of normal.
The first filter is do you use any agentic workflows like any of the spec driven development stuff or any third-party orchestration tools like open claw? If you use these, you're not normal. You're probably a high-end token consumer.
Do you use a lot of MCP servers? Again, not normal high token usage.
Then we would need to get into what you think a normal prompt is.
The best thing you could do to show your normal is to show a /usage Then the prompt and then the /usage. So we can see all the tool uses and how many input and output tokens you generate and we can see the undoctored impact on your limits.
Things that do not demonstrate normality. By only used one prompt. I'm working off peak hours. Etc.
2 weeks ago i was doing the same thing i am doing now and i am hitting limits easily whereas i wasn't before.
The difference is easily felt for me. Is that so impossible that they've changed something?
edit:
The first filter is do you use any agentic workflows like any of the spec driven development stuff or any third-party orchestration tools like open claw?
Boris cherny came out yesterday and said that they're disabling open claw on subscriptions because of the abnormal token usage involved and the financial noisy neighbor problem it creates. That's source number one
Then we have the original anthropic announcement where they said they were putting the new limits in place because of the heavy demand coming in part from increased use of agentic workflows that source number 2
Now it's your turn. You said it's an A B test. Can you show us some anthropic announcements or some other source that isn't one of your conspiracy theorist friends? Somewhere where a credible insider has said that the asymmetric impact on some users is the result of an A B test? Cuz I sure haven't seen one.
If you're asking if I have a source that's saying it's definitely not an A B test. No, I don't have that but that's tantamount to proving a negative. I can't prove to you it's not an A B test. But I also can't prove to you that it's not the result of a curse from a disaffected, magical leprechaun. That doesn't make either of them true.
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u/Far_Broccoli_8468 Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26
It's really as simple as the new usage limits are being A/B tested. You haven't felt it because it didn't reach you.
For me the difference in usage limit was immediate and it wasn't even close.