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The Claude Code limit boost ended on its stated minute. Limits did not go back to where they started — they settled 25% higher.

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Anthropic's temporary increase to weekly limits in Claude Code, extended three times since May, ended as its terms said it would: through September 13, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT. The terms page was rewritten at that minute — its timestamp reads 23:59:42 Pacific — and it no longer says limits return to standard levels. Instead: starting September 14, weekly limits in Claude Code are 25% higher than they were before the promotion, for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans. Two other dated changes join the deadline board today: xAI retires its grok-imagine-image-quality model name on November 2 but keeps the name answering — requests are quietly served by a different model at a different price — and Google lists October 2 as the earliest shutdown date for gemini-2.5-flash-image.

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Some promotional windows end quietly and some move. This one did something less common: it ended exactly when it said it would, and the thing it was supposed to end did not come all the way back.

The window closed on its minute

Anthropic's help-centre article for the Claude Code weekly-limits promotion has been extended three times since May. Its terms, as of this morning, read: "This offer was valid from May 13, 2026 through September 13, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT."

The article was rewritten at that minute. Its own edit timestamp is 2026-09-14T06:59:42Z — 11:59:42 PM Pacific on September 13 — and it now speaks in the past tense: "This promotion was a limited-time boost on top of your plan. It ran from May 13 through September 13, 2026." During the window, it says, "your weekly usage limit in Claude Code was 50% higher."

And limits did not go back

Until yesterday the article said that afterwards, limits would "return to their standard levels." That sentence is gone. The new opening paragraph reads:

"We were planning to return weekly limits to their original levels, but we know many of you found the extra usage helpful. So while the full promotional boost couldn't last, we're making part of it permanent: starting September 14, 2026, weekly limits in Claude Code are 25% higher than they were before the promotion for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans."

So the practical reading for anyone on those plans is simple: the extra room you had for four months is smaller today, but it is still a quarter more than you had before May. There is nothing to do; the change applies on its own.

Two small things are worth noticing. The eligibility line now says "seat-based Enterprise plans," where the earlier terms named legacy seat-based Enterprise users. And the article's title still names May–August, a window that was extended past its own name three times.

Also on the deadline board today

xAI keeps an old model name answering. xAI's migration guide states: "Effective November 2, 2026, the grok-imagine-image-quality model slug is retired from the xAI API." But it does not stop working. "The slug continues to resolve, so you do not need to change your code to avoid breakage" — requests to it are served by grok-imagine-image-2.0 at low quality, which the guide says "is priced differently than the model it replaces." The numbers favour the caller: "$0.01 per image cheaper than grok-imagine-image-quality at every resolution." But the model producing your images changes on November 2 whether or not you touch anything, and xAI's own advice is: "We recommend switching to grok-imagine-image-2.0 explicitly before November 2."

Google lists an image model's earliest shutdown. The Gemini API deprecations page, last updated September 5, lists gemini-2.5-flash-image with a shutdown date of October 2, 2026 and gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview as its replacement. Google's own caveat applies: "The shutdown dates listed in the table indicate the earliest possible dates on which a model might be retired."

The same table carries two longer dates worth writing down now, under the same caveat: gemini-3.1-flash-lite, earliest shutdown May 7, 2027, with gemini-3.5-flash-lite named as the replacement; and gemini-embedding-001, earliest shutdown May 14, 2028, replaced by gemini-embedding-2. The embedding date is the one to plan for: a stored index built with one embedding model does not carry over to another without re-embedding the documents.

What is not established

  • Why. None of these pages gives a reason for the change it announces.
  • What "25% higher" is 25% of. The article states the increase relative to pre-promotion limits; it does not publish the limits themselves.
  • Whether the Enterprise wording is a change in who qualifies or only a rewording. The article does not say.
  • Google's date is a floor, not a schedule. "Earliest possible" means the model may run past October 2; it is not a promise that it stops then. Google's pages also refuse this desk's plain client, so they were read through a rendering fetcher.
  • xAI's pricing comparison is xAI's. This record quotes it; it did not bill a request to check it.

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