Anthropic tightens Claude limits and OpenAI courts defectors
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
Anthropic is putting new limits on what paying customers can do with their subscriptions, giving rival OpenAI an opening to lure power users to Codex.
Why it matters: The fight shows that "all-you-can-eat" AI subscriptions may not survive the agent era, where software can burn through computing resources far faster than humans ever could.
Driving the news: Anthropic announced that it's bringing back support for outside agent tools on paid Claude plans. But it is putting that usage behind a separate credit meter.
- Subscribers will now get a new monthly credit that they can use with third-party harnesses like OpenClaw.
- Anthropic says that new changes should support the ways that the majority of people use Claude.
What they're saying: Anthropic's changes didn't go over well.
- Claude Code product manager Noah Zweben's X post about the new rules was riddled with critical replies, with respondents calling the changes "gaslighting" and claiming to be switching to Codex.
The intrigue: OpenAI is taking the opposite tack, at least for now. CEO Sam Altman announced on X that OpenAI is giving new business customers two months of free Codex usage.
Zoom in: The industry appears to be rediscovering a lesson from earlier eras of computing: humans have built-in limits to how much data they can consume, while automated workloads can explode usage.
- A human might send dozens or perhaps hundreds of prompts a day, while an autonomous coding agent can generate thousands of requests, run tests continuously, browse the web, and recursively call models.
The other side: Businesses are finding that AI agents can lead to hefty bills.
- ServiceNow and Uber are among the companies that have already burned through their AI token budgets for the entire year, per The Information's Laura Bratton.
What we're watching: Everyone is facing the same economics and will eventually need to move away from unlimited use.
- Anthropic has been among the more aggressive in restricting use because it's been the top choice for coders who use agents the most and have been struggling to maintain enough compute resources.
