Claude Code's "permanent increase" to weekly limits is a cut from today
Anthropic's new 25% baseline bump for Claude Code replaces a 50% temporary boost that expired the day before, leaving weekly capacity 17% lower than users had the previous week -- a gap Anthropic's own announcement initially didn't spell out.
Anthropic's own help-center article confirms that "weekly limits in Claude Code are 25% higher than they were before the promotion," effective September 14, across Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Read alone, that's a straightforward upgrade. Read against the article's own timeline, it's smaller than what Claude Code users already had: a temporary 50% boost had been running since May 13 and expired at 11:59 PM PT on September 13, one day before the new "permanent" 25% baseline took effect. Against a baseline of 100, that's 150 the week before, 125 the week after -- a 17% drop from what users were actually using, not from where they started.
The framing didn't survive contact with users
Per BleepingComputer's Mayank Parmar, Anthropic's initial X announcement led with the 25% increase without stating the net effect, then the company deleted that post and reposted a version that put the comparison in plain terms: "this works out to a 17% reduction in weekly limits on Claude Code." Five-hour session limits, which govern short-burst usage rather than the weekly cap, are unaffected by either the promotion or its end, per Anthropic's own article.
Why this matters for Merit AC
A weekly usage cap is a hard ceiling on how much Claude Code work a seat can actually produce, independent of what a company is paying for the seat -- exactly the kind of spend-to-output gap Merit AC's tracking exists to catch. A team that budgeted around the promotional 50% boost, or renewed a Claude Code rollout expecting that capacity to hold, now has 17% less throughput per seat than its own recent baseline, whether or not that shows up in anyone's invoice.