Anthropic says Claude Code's usage drain comes down to peak-hour caps and ballooning contexts

Anthropic has looked into complaints from users who were hitting their Claude Code usage limits much faster than expected. According to Anthropic's Lydia Hallie, tighter limits during peak hours and sessions with 1-million-token contexts growing larger are the two main reasons for the problem. Hallie says Anthropic also fixed some bugs, but none of them led to incorrect billing. The company has also shipped efficiency improvements and added in-product pop-ups to keep users informed.

Hallie recommends using Sonnet 4.6 instead of Opus, since Opus burns through limits roughly twice as fast. She also suggests turning off Extended Thinking when it's not needed, starting fresh sessions instead of continuing old ones, and limiting the context window. Users who still notice unusually high usage should report it through the feedback function.