Anthropic Renames Claude Max 20x to Ultra and Drops the 5-Hour Cap for Verified Subscribers

Anthropic has reorganized the top of its Claude subscription ladder. As of October 30, the Max 5x plan is simply Max, still $100 per month, and the Max 20x plan is Ultra, still $200 per month. Existing subscribers move over automatically and need to do nothing; the pricing page now runs Free, Pro, Max, Ultra, Team and Enterprise.

The rename comes with one substantive change: verified Ultra accounts no longer have a rolling five-hour session limit. Anthropic said the removal took effect for most existing subscribers on day one, and that newer accounts keep a temporary limit until verification completes — an automatic check based on factors like account and payment history, designed to block fraud and account resale. Users get an email when the limit lifts; verifying a phone number at checkout does not affect the process.

Weekly allowances did not change. Ultra remains 10 times Pro usage per week; Max keeps both its five-hour window and its weekly allowance at 5 times Pro. In other words, the change redistributes when Ultra users can work, not how much: long coding sessions and multi-step agent runs that used to slam into the mid-session reset can now run continuously, but total volume is unchanged.

The new names also clear up a long-standing confusion. The 20x in the old plan name referred to usage inside the five-hour window, while the weekly cap was always 10 times Pro — a distinction few subscribers fully understood. Anthropic's move to multiplier-free names, plus verification-gated session limits, looks a lot like a cloud provider's quota model: prove you are a real customer, then get flexibility on timing with hard caps on volume.

Both paid tiers retain their perks: access to Claude Fable, the company's most capable model, charged against up to half the weekly usage limit, plus monthly Claude Platform API credits of $100 on Max and $200 on Ultra. Claude Code is included across Pro, Max and Ultra.

The five-hour window was among the most complained-about design choices in Claude's pricing, particularly from developers running Claude Code for hours at a time who kept hitting the reset mid-task. By removing it only on the verified $200 tier, Anthropic is making a targeted bet: the people who feel the window most are also the people most likely to pay for it, and verification keeps the loosened limits from being resold.