Anthropic Raises Rate Limits for Claude Code and Opus API
May 6, 2026 - 4:48 pm
Anthropic has announced significant enhancements to its AI services, citing a new partnership with SpaceX. Here’s a breakdown of the changes:
- Rate Limit Increase: Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits have doubled across all plans: Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise.
- Peak Hours Removal: The peak-hours throttling mechanism has been eliminated for Claude Code on Pro and Max accounts.
- API Rate Boost: API rate limits for Claude Opus models have been substantially raised.
These improvements are made possible by a new compute agreement with SpaceX, enabling access to all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center. This partnership brings over 300 megawatts of new capacity and 220,000 Nvidia GPUs online within the month, directly benefiting Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.
Anthropic also expressed interest in expanding this collaboration with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.
Recent Compute Commitments:
This announcement follows several other significant compute partnerships:
- A 5-gigawatt agreement with Amazon, with 1 GW of new capacity expected by the end of 2026.
- A 5 GW agreement with Google and Broadcom, set to begin in 2027.
- A strategic partnership with Microsoft and Nvidia, including $30 billion of Azure capacity.
- A $50 billion investment with Fluidstack for American AI infrastructure.
Anthropic trains and serves its AI models on a variety of hardware, including AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs. The company continues to explore opportunities to bring additional capacity online, with some expansions planned internationally.
In response to enterprise customers' needs for data residency and compliance, Anthropic is adding inference capacity in Asia and Europe in collaboration with Amazon. The company emphasizes its commitment to democratic countries with supportive legal frameworks.
Furthermore, Anthropic has pledged to cover any consumer electricity price increases caused by its US data centers and is exploring extending this commitment to new jurisdictions as it expands globally.