Agents left running 24/7 trigger new usage caps
Anthropic added weekly Claude Code limits, citing subscribers running it continuously in the background around the clock.
- Agents
- Claude Code
- Reported
- Source checked
- Tags
- usage-limits, background-agents, billing
Symptom
Background or looping agents stop mid-task when a weekly limit hits, or API-billed usage grows much faster than expected.
Cause
Long-running, unattended agents burn usage continuously. Providers respond with hard caps, which can halt work in the middle of a task.
Fix
Budget agents explicitly: cap turns and spend per task, commit progress in small steps so a cut-off is cheap, and alert on usage before you hit the limit.
# Bound an unattended run
claude -p "$TASK" --max-turns 30
# and commit progress each step so a cut-off loses little
git add -A && git commit -m "wip: step $N"