What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

https://minimaxir.com/2026/07/agent-quota-reset/

by minimaxir • 4 days ago

85 88 4 days ago

I like money.

If I had to guess uncharitably, I’d say they want you to feel like you keep getting something extra for “free” while you’re getting the same service you should have expected as normal 3 months ago.

adamsmark• 4 days ago

My guess is they are getting folks used to the idea of:

1. The end of unlimited token subsidization and a new status quo of metered usage limits.

2. Adding to the above, self-initiated usage limit resets give you some control and again help lessen the sting of the end of subsidization.

Right now though, I think Anthropic and OpenAI are in open MAU war ahead of their respective IPOs and that might be a bigger factor.

fireant• 4 days ago

Are you saying that because they are ending subsidies, they are giving more subsidies?

InsideOutSanta2• 4 days ago

My impression is that, particularly on Anthropic's side, their confusing approach to quota limits is an intentional attempt to make the actual limits or offerings more opaque. This will make it easier to limit quota without officially limiting quota, because the current real-world quota is a result of bonus offerings, limited-time access, and random resets.

So it's not that "limits went down"; it's that "the bonus offer ended as planned."

theplumber• 4 days ago

In reality their approach creates only friction and frustration and forces users to other competing products(I.e Kimi K3). Once they stop subsidising the prices the users will go away to cheaper models. I could bet my own max plans.

jdthedisciple• 4 days ago

That explains it! I was wondering about this just today as I saw it hd reset. Alas I don't need to wait another 7 days..

dlenski5• 4 days ago

This article reads like a description of gambling-addiction behavior; the author appears to be addicted to using LLMs.

He's eagerly awaiting his next hit of dopamine from his favorite model. He's setting timers to be ready for when his next hit comes available. He's spinning up unnecessary queries just to start the timer ticking on new models.

You could basically write the same article about some guy who sits in a casino all day eagerly awaiting double-your-winnings bonuses or similar.

serf• 4 days ago

This article reads like a description of gambling-addiction behavior; the author appears to be addicted to using LLMs.

you're projecting, it's just insanely irritating to work with a tool that 1) limits its' own use 2) with a random interval.

keeping in mind that plenty of people are making money on token use..

this guy sets a timer to wake up for work; he appears to be addicted to work.

rob• 4 days ago

I have a subscription. If I don't have anything to do at the moment I don't use it. I don't think I need to set a timer every five hours and come up with tasks to do just to use my subscription. Seems like odd behavior?

I also have a Netflix subscription. I watch a couple of things on it and stop. I don't think to myself I need to maximize my subscription so let me watch movies all the time and wake up at 2 AM to make sure the next movie starts.

dlenski5• 4 days ago

it's just insanely irritating to work with a tool that 1) limits its' own use 2) with a random interval.

Do you understand how the psychological response to the "random" disappearance of an annoyance is pretty much exactly the same as the psychological response to the "random" appearance of a reward?

I put "random" in square quotes because neither are in fact totally random, but both are clearly quite carefully engineered to provoke the desired response.

you're projecting

I am not projecting. My total lifetime gambling consists of maybe 10 or 15 cash poker games with high school friends, ten minutes at a casino in Montréal which I found a revolting experience, and receiving a few $1 scratch lottery tickets as party favors.

vitaflo• 4 days ago

If you don’t want 1 or 2 then pay by the token. If that’s too expensive for you then now you know why 1 and 2 exist.

minimaxir6• 4 days ago

Gambling addition implies dopamine hits from irregular and uncertain outcomes: as I note in the post, I don't get a dopamine hit from running agents. I know people say "LLMs are just gambling because they're next-token-maximizers that can't write real code" but with GPT 5.6 Sol (and a few new tricks I discovered) the outputs are much less irregular and uncertain. It's just typical engineering.

"Not wanting to waste money" is the polar opposite of gambling.

dehrmann• 4 days ago

dopamine hits from irregular and uncertain outcomes

Like the LLM getting the solution right?

dlenski5• 4 days ago

Gambling addition implies dopamine hits from irregular and uncertain outcomes

Your post literally describes your fascination with trying to figure out the pattern of a "random" reward that you get, and trying to maximize the value you get out of it.

I put "random" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that—just as slot machine payouts are carefully structured to keep you playing—these LLM resets are structured to keep heavy users like you coming back to max out their usage, and to progressively upgrade it.

Several other commenters have also stated this same suspicion about the pattern of resets you're describing.

"Not wanting to waste money" is the polar opposite of gambling.

From everything I've read about gambling addiction, particularly Jay Caspian Kang, that seems wrong.

The desire to "not waste money" and "get back to even" seems like a huge part of what motivates gamblers to keep gambling.

somewhereoutth2• 4 days ago

and a few new tricks I discovered

This right here. Any gambler would recognize that statement.

epitrochoid413• 4 days ago

Yes I agree with you here.

LLMs tend to be a bit random, but are still more consistent and predictable than slot-machines. Also, gambling tends to exert lower effort and higher dopamine hits than vibe-coding, making it way more addictive.

But LLMs are still addictive to some extent. Maybe its around the same level as other behavioral addictions like food, social media, or gaming addictions.

nightshift1• 4 days ago

I think it is because the plans are crazy expensive. when you pay 200-300$/month for an online subscription, its normal to want to extract as much value as possible.

huflungdung• 4 days ago

No it’s definitely addiction

perching_aix• 4 days ago

Oh this is a good idea actually, that reset checker site allows for setting up a scheduled agent job, so that GPT alerts me when there's been a reset :)

margalabargala2• 4 days ago

He's spinning up unnecessary queries just to start the timer ticking on new models.

This one just makes sense though. If you have a body of work to do that you know will exceed your 5 hour limit, then sending a message 3 hours before you start so that the reset happens in the middle enables you to do a task in one sitting.

InsideOutSanta2• 4 days ago

Yeah, I subjectively definitely feel like using LLMs has aspects of gambling. It's 100% a Skinner box where I push a button with a high chance of a substantial reward. It's fun and addictive.

But setting an automatic prompt in the morning so limits are more sensible during the day and allow continuous work is just common sense.

bulbar• 4 days ago

Addiction is about negative impact on your private and professional life and the life of those around you and doing things about your will or things you know are bad for you.

Might be the case here, but just setting a timer and being generally hyped about something is not enough for that.

Very weird how convinced some here seem to be that addiction is involved while they apparently don't know anything about the diagnosis criteria.

minimaxir6• 4 days ago

Ironically my time and focus on agentic prompting and coding has helped me break an actual bad addiction (World of Warcraft)

CamperBob22• 4 days ago

Competition. If Anthropic had followed through on their plan to put Fable under API pricing, users would have jumped ship en masse to GPT 5.6 (or perhaps to K3 if it turns out to be good enough.)

noworriesnate2• 4 days ago

Theoretically it'll still happen tomorrow. But we'll see--I think they've extended it twice?

CamperBob22• 4 days ago

My understanding is that they are no longer threatening to do it, it's part of the Max plan now (which I use.) The $20/month subscribers might still have to pay as they go, though.

trollbridge• 4 days ago

Anthropic gave up. A $200 Max sub now gets you access to Fable 5.

Anthropic's game is over.

Jcampuzano2• 4 days ago

They're giving everyone their next hit.

What I read on social media about people and these resets gives off literal worst kind of addiction vibes. I've literally seen people talking about "Oh I had an existential crisis without Fable/GPT-5.6"

These people legitimately need help, or alternatively a social life.

Maybe its different on my end because I just use a sub outside of work for fun stuff. At work its not my money so I don't really care. I go to work, maybe use these subs at home every once in a while for a fun personal project and if I hit the limits (I rarely even do) I play video games or hang out with my wife/family.

People are borderline tying their identities to these models it seems, and yet most people aren't even building anything interesting.

dlenski5• 4 days ago

They're giving everyone their next hit.

Yes, 100%. The author seems to be describing, quite lucidly, how he is getting sucked into a gambling-like addiction to these LLMs… although he seems unaware of the implications of that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48961596

ifwinterco2• 4 days ago

Definitely, although there is a massive sampling bias: the minority of people who are in that state are also much more likely to post about it online.

Most likely (hopefully) 99% of users aren't like that and they'll just log off if quotas get slashed

cyanydeez• 3 days ago

I think yo umean people who are dependent on an AI agent system to do their work have nothing else to do when they go down.

It's really hard to blame the druggies when there's multinational billion dollar companies manufacturing the drugs.

But alas, we're in the grift economy, so the marks are to blame for falling for the fraud.

techjamie• 3 days ago

I have a $20 Claude sub, and the closest I've come to hitting a limit was when I was using it to fight back against some scammers spreading a stealer on discord. I was having Claude decode their webhook strings, and the first time I blew them up with pings to get a job, then just started deleting the hooks from under them when they published new versions.

But for standard productivity, I've never come remotely close to hitting a limit.

gedy• 3 days ago

Same here, and - while not trying to troll - the people I know who loudly proclaim how they keep hitting their limits are the ones who also seem to be blindly trying things through trial and error. A lot of wheel spinning, etc.

bsder• 3 days ago

They're giving everyone their next hit.

More like trying to prevent people from moving off of them.

The only people that these companies are really trying to limit are the tokenmaxxers on flat rate plans and enterprises on flat rate plans that are cheating and should be on the API plan.

For everybody else, it's way better to reset their quotas if you have the capacity. If you cut someone off, they're likely to either associate your brand with being unreliable or go try a different tool. Both outcomes are going to cost you money.

j45• 4 days ago

It feels like Anthropic was affected by resource limitations upon launch or big adoption curves in the past, and now they're tyring to be mindful of having less of those, in several ways, one of which is trying to keep capacity to keep core services running and let the high demand not impact the rest of the system.

WHen it doesn't turn out that way, it opens up options.

At the same time if other model providers were anticipating Anthropic or someone else to have problems at launch, and were waiting in the wings with their own models to launch competitively, it sets off a capacity release competition.

One might lower prices, one might give it away, or just make it available, and then there are users on other platforms with limits, or free until a certain day, etc.

skeledrew2• 4 days ago

Yeah I've been noticing for a while. Definitely didn't want to be one of the first to bring it up! Few weeks ago it was really unexpected resets the day before the actually reset. Now I'm noticing Claude keeps going for a while after the 7 day quota hits 100% (I setup my statusline to include quota as I got tired of checking the app), but also it could just be bad calibration and even at 100% I still actually have quota left.

skybrian• 4 days ago

I think this is because they're having trouble with capacity planning. They plan conservatively, and they have extra capacity that's going unused. But they don't want to commit to anything, in case usage spikes.

h4kunamata• 4 days ago

Read: AI companies found a way to make AI chatbot to look less expensive driving people to become more addicted to it.

Havoc• 4 days ago

Push down official on paper limits while limiting real world backlash by artificially inflating real world usage above paper limits with resets.

acedTrex• 4 days ago

Ive typed out several things, none of them really capture succinctly the level of disdain I have for people that this article is describing.

I cannot fathom the idea that one is warping their work on a given engineering problem around the availability of a magic next token predictor box.

tough• 4 days ago

Operant conditioning random reinforcement is a pretty well researched science

cadamsdotcom• 4 days ago

This is the result of a forgotten phenomenon called "competition".

Fordec• 4 days ago

The last few have corresponded to basically within the hour or two of the release of a competing model that is getting good reviews. Twice I've gone "well, I'm over my weekly limit for the next two days, may as well check this out" and almost just as I've finished that thought, a refresh landed and I went to blitz a week of usage in 48 hours instead because once it's gone, it's gone.

Hurray market competition and what capitalism was meant to be. Go above in providing a service or the customer leaves.

cryo322• 4 days ago

Heroin dealer running a loss leader operation.

blitzar• 4 days ago

I'll tell you what, that crack is really moreish.

unshavedyak3• 3 days ago

Which is funny because I’ll take the free crack in this case lol. Am I addicted to this new workflow? No idea but there are many providers. I feel like I’m being given free VC money so yea, I’ll use it.

My expectation is that this cash handout is going to stop soon, so take while the giving is good right?

I should note that for my workflow /loop is eating the credits, so it’s basically no skin off my back. I just queue up some more work and let it go.

thn-gap• 3 days ago

Sounds exactly like the person who is about to find out they are addicted

cryo322• 3 days ago

I can stop any time. I promise.

snayan• 4 days ago

I think your hedonic treadmill's motor is close to burning out. Might be time to hop off for a bit.

edit: Ok, I have been reflecting for a bit. This article really irked me and I realize now it's because I see a lot of a former version of myself in it.

Anyhow, to the author, I implore you to take a step back and look at what your mind is doing. Humans love prediction, and we love optimization, I get it. But, you're effectively rewriting history, and holding yourself to an impossible standard of perfectly optimizing past decisions with future information. As a result, you're sucking the joy out of pursuit that you seem to love.

I know it's easier said than done to not have your mind work against you like this. But, I think you might benefit from taking a step back and asking what your actual goals are in the work you're doing, and what sufficient value to justify the $100/mo subscription looks like in terms of output or work. Playing the token consumption optimization game is a losing battle that has turned a free gift into a source of angst.

sadfgknerknksdf• 4 days ago

It's a weird thing to optimize for. If you care about availability for work you can just pay more where it feels limitless and never look at the limits. I think a lot of people have a tendency to want to minmax as a "game". I also occasionally have the urge to do it but then realize it's a means to an end, not the end itself. I would feel good having maximised usage even if it wasn't productive usage which is irrational.

I think the main problem is the usage limits. You would never feel like you are saving money by watching movies on Netflix. If they didn't have limits, many might find themselves using agents less actually.

SyneRyder2• 4 days ago

If you care about availability for work you can just pay more where it feels limitless and never look at the limits...

Depending on your work, it doesn't feel limitless - I've just upgraded to a $200 plan and I'm starting to see where I will even hit the edges of that, especially once resets and special offers start tapering off. But with a single AI question often costing $75 in API costs, I'm not at a point where I can just switch to API and not care about cost at all.

That means I need to carefully time the work to make sure I'm squeezing what I can into the 5 hour windows. Feels a bit like the days of mainframes and time slicing, when you had to book an allotted time for your workload to run.

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/wya/AcademicComputing/text/earlyt...

Zababa• 4 days ago

Resets of the weekly quota for all users must be ludicrously expensive for these companies

Why can't people see the alternative hypothesis, inference has huuuuuge margins?

wronex• 4 days ago

I can see three reasons:

1. They have left over capacity that will go unused otherwise. Most users have hit their limits before the end of the week. Might as well get some use out of the servers.

2. A backend change made migrating usage tracking hard, inaccurate, or impossible.

3. A usage tracking issue meant the usage wasn’t accurate anyway and they needed a reset to save face / avoid contract breach.

The addiction or marketing strategy seems too clever. Why explain something with cleverness that can be explained by laziness or stupidity.

hooch• 3 days ago

This

dathinab• 4 days ago

putting aside the possibility of very badly implemented token limiting doing requiring our accidentally just doing a reset for whatever reason

we (industry) have reached the point where questions about productivity gain, use-cost analysis and similar get asked increasingly more often

by resetting tokens they are silently decreasing the cost and increasing the use (hit limit ==usefulness stops until end of period) they are effectively fudging any "simple" internal company studies in their favor leading to a potentially pretty bad surprise if this isn't noticed by the assessing personal

An alternative is that they bought to many GPU resources in relationship to actual demand and they still need to show that they are "highly used".

Either its is appreciated for anyone benefiting from it but fishy as which company which doesn't do something fishy gives out rabbats to already paying users without turning it into a advertisement/PR benefit???

dizhn• 4 days ago

I paid for a month of Claude and paradoxically I am not using it at all because of how quickly the 5 hr limit fills. Deepseek and Mimo do not give me that "Time's running out" anxiety.

lardosaurusrex2• 3 days ago

Addiction being enabled is a big thing but AI stocks are dropping and the companies are getting nervous people will stop investing or -- worse for them and better for the planet -- start selling it all off.

Combined with the fact that China's also catching up with its open source AI (no i dont want to debate whether or not it actually is or if china is 'safe'; particularly not with anyone from the USA as i am canadian) and also everyone protesting against the giant data centres AND the UK giving up on digital IDs?

yeah. they're trying to get people hooked again.

graemep• 3 days ago

The thing you are skipping over there is not whether China is safe, but whether open weights are open source.

lardosaurusrex2• 3 days ago

I'm not skipping over anything because I didn't think to mention it my dude, gal and/or pal.

Diogenesian• 3 days ago

I agree that you're being a bit pedantic, but it is a real loss to our language that these models are described as "open source." If you want to use an LLM then open-weight is fantastic. If you want to understand an LLM then it's useless: at the very least you need the pretraining data.

Open-weight is free beer without the freedom. But LLMs are evil by construction and using them makes people stupider, so I suppose "free beer [moderately cursed]" is appropriate.

nlawalker• 3 days ago

Software engineering has always been kind of a game for the people who love it; it turns out that making it a game-as-a-service with lootboxes is just as effective for driving engagement as with other kinds of games.

EagleEdge• 3 days ago

I am also trying to resist all those remote control, control from your phone, or run your agents from anywhere kind of "promotions". I feel like they are trying to make us addicted to AI agents. I set my work up before I go home in the evening and no more agent-checking until next morning.

HarHarVeryFunny• 2 days ago

I get the impression it's mostly a reaction to the competition. If a competitor releases a frontier model then Anthropic do a reset, perhaps hoping to prevent subscribers from straying and trying the new model.

What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

Related Stories