I am a Max 5x subscriber. Do I need to do anything?
Per Anthropic, existing subscribers need to do nothing; the plan is simply renamed Max and still costs $100 a month.
The removal of the 5-hour limit applies only to verified Ultra, not to Max.
How do I know if my Ultra account is verified?
The Help Center says to open Usage in Settings; if you do not see a Current session bar, you are verified.
If it is still there, you are not verified yet, and you just wait for Anthropic's email saying it has been removed.
How much bigger is Ultra's weekly ceiling than Max's?
Per the write-ups, Max is 5x Pro and Ultra is 10x, and weekly limits are unchanged. Why the old 20x name maps to 10x is not stated in the sources.
I could not confirm that mapping from official pages, so look at the pricing page before deciding.
How do the monthly API credits work?
The write-ups mention $100 in monthly API credits for Max and $200 for Ultra, but I found no explanation of what they can be applied to or whether they roll over.
If these credits are part of your reason to upgrade, confirm the terms in the Help Center before counting them in your costs.
On October 30, Anthropic renamed Max 5x to Max ($100 a month) and Max 20x to Ultra ($200 a month) with no price change, and began removing the rolling 5-hour usage cap for verified Ultra accounts. A word on sourcing first: the original announcement is a post by @claudeai on X, which I could not view directly; what follows comes from AI Weekly's relay of a Techmeme item and from Four Week MBA's write-up citing Anthropic's pricing page and Help Center, so check the official pages for details.
According to those write-ups, the three plans look like this: Pro is $20 a month (about $17 billed annually) and is the usage baseline; Max gives 5x Pro usage under both the 5-hour and weekly limits, with $100 in monthly API credits; Ultra has a weekly ceiling of 10x Pro, $200 in monthly API credits, and no 5-hour limit for verified accounts. Weekly limits are unchanged. Four Week MBA's arithmetic is that each plan works out to about $20 per Pro-week of usage; that is the article's calculation, not Anthropic's statement.
Anthropic says it will automatically verify Ultra accounts using factors such as account and payment history, to help prevent fraud and abuse. The Help Center offers a way to check yourself: in Settings under Usage, if you do not see a Current session bar, your account is verified. Newer accounts keep the 5-hour cap until verification finishes and get an email when it is lifted. Anthropic has not said how long verification takes or how many subscribers are already verified; the announcement says starting today with most existing subscribers, so it is unclear whether every existing Ultra subscriber is covered. Existing subscribers need to do nothing.
Several things are not addressed in the sources: how the old 20x name maps to today's 10x weekly Pro figure, where the Help Center implies the old weekly allowance was already 10x Pro, though that is the article's reading and not Anthropic's explicit statement; what exactly the monthly API credits can be applied to and whether they roll over, which I found no explanation of; and the specific verification criteria. Before deciding to upgrade, read the pricing page and the Help Center article What is the Ultra plan? directly.
What dropping the 5-hour cap is worth depends on which limit you actually hit. If you often run into the 5-hour cap mid-workday and have to stop, Ultra's difference will be obvious; if your real bottleneck is the weekly cap, Ultra only moves the weekly allowance from Max's 5x to 10x, and the question is whether that is worth an extra $100. The method is simple: look at the past few weeks and see whether you hit the 5-hour cap or the weekly cap, then decide. If you are already an Ultra subscriber, open the Usage page and see whether the Current session bar is still there; if it is, you are not yet verified, and the email is all you need to wait for.