Claude is exploding in popularity, and that has consequences.

Anthropic's quirky chatbot has been on a tear during the opening months of 2026. In fact, it's been gaining new users so quickly that it's facing serious growing pains. In recent weeks, Claude has faced a series of outages that have caused it to dip below the 99% uptime standard for most applications.

And because of Claude's growing popularity and the company's difficulty handling the rapid influx of new users, it is now adjusting how users burn through their limits during peak hours. On weekdays between 8:00 am and 2:00 pm ET, users across the Free, Pro, and Max tiers will all hit their session limits faster, an Anthropic engineer explained on X.

He estimated that the changes will impact about 7% of users and recommended that people shift highly intensive background jobs to non-peak hours.

So what does this mean in practice?

• It's surge pricing for chatbots: This is essentially the same thing Uber does for ride costs during rush hour. But instead of changing more money, Anthropic is trying to change user behavior to spread out the requests made to Claude.
• Most users won't be impacted: If all you do is use Claude to ask questions and help create documents, then this move is good for you, as it will likely increase Claude's uptime and performance for those tasks.
• Peak hours cost more per action: Before this change, 1 prompt used 1 unit of your Claude usage budget, and the cost stayed the same all day. Now, during peak hours, 1 prompt might equal 1.5 to 2 units (Anthropic hasn't said what the exact formula will be).

The move doesn't come as a surprise, since Claude's growth has been so meteoric in such a short time. It's no secret how expensive it is to run chatbots and how hard it is for these companies to obtain the GPUs and compute necessary to grow. A report from consumer transactions analysis company Indagari and analyzed by TechCrunch (see chart below), shows Claude's paid users skyrocketed in the first two months of 2026.

Chart credit: TechCrunch

Our Deeper View

While Claude's growth is impressive, we should also put it in perspective. Anthropic doesn't say how many monthly active users Claude has. Even the most optimistic estimates put the number between 30 million and 180 million. Meanwhile, OpenAI's ChatGPT is at 900 million. So ChatGPT remains 5x to 20x larger than Claude. And while Claude is rapidly onboarding new users, ChatGPT still signs up twice as many new subscribers each week. Nevertheless, since mid-2025, most of the people I know who use generative AI most intensively have been saying they've made Claude their primary chatbot because they perceive it produces higher-quality results. With a lot of people switching from ChatGPT to Claude in recent months, it will be important to see whether they share the same perception and stick around. Many people tend to choose the easier option — including the one that doesn't suffer outages — over the higher-quality one. That still leaves plenty of opportunity for competitors to win over AI users in the months and years ahead.