Claude Code's Usage Bug and the Fight Behind It
My session limit drained in two hours. The bug is real, but the timing points to something bigger: Anthropic's standoff with the Pentagon.
My Claude Code session limit hit 100% in under two hours last week. I was doing normal work. Nothing unusual in my workflow, no massive context dumps, no runaway loops. I checked Reddit and found dozens of people reporting the same thing: limits draining in minutes, sessions dying mid-task, plans ↗ costing $100–$200/month behaving like free tiers.
The first instinct is to blame a bug. And there is a bug. GitHub issues are piling up on Anthropic’s own repo (#38335 ↗, #9424 ↗), and Anthropic responded by doubling usage limits through March 27 ↗ as a temporary fix. The frustration is measurable: a METR study ↗ found that Claude Code increased task completion time by 19% compared to working without it, largely because users kept hitting limits mid-task and losing flow. But the timing of when this latest wave of issues started deserves more attention than it’s getting.
March 23, 2026 ↗. The same week Anthropic’s standoff with the Pentagon became public.
What Anthropic Refused#
This is not a company that quietly declined a government contract. Anthropic published a formal statement ↗ explaining exactly what the Department of War demanded and what they refused to allow.
Two things. Mass domestic surveillance of Americans using their AI models. And fully autonomous weapons systems without human oversight in the decision chain.
On the weapons point: the distinction matters. Partially autonomous weapons, where a human confirms the final decision to engage, already exist and Anthropic has no objection to those. Fully autonomous means the AI selects and strikes a target with no human in the loop. Think a drone that identifies, decides, and fires without a soldier ever pressing a button. Anthropic’s argument is that current AI models hallucinate and make errors at rates that are simply not acceptable for that kind of irreversible action.
The government’s position: accept “any lawful use” and remove the safety restrictions. Anthropic’s position: no.
The Pentagon’s response was to threaten designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” ↗ That label has previously been reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei and ZTE. Applying it to a U.S. company is unprecedented. A California judge noted the government may be “attempting to cripple Anthropic.”
The government’s counterargument is worth stating clearly. The Pentagon’s position is not “we want rogue AI.” Their argument is that AI deployment decisions in national security contexts should be governed by existing law and military oversight, not unilaterally by a private company’s internal safety team. From that angle, Anthropic is being asked to trust the legal and institutional framework the U.S. already has, not to override it. Whether you find that convincing depends on how much you trust those institutions right now.
The OpenAI Contrast#
OpenAI joined Stargate ↗, a U.S. government AI initiative ↗ worth $500B with direct Pentagon involvement. They accepted the terms. They are not facing this pressure.
I’m not saying one decision is obviously correct. But the contrast explains a lot about why Claude Code feels like it’s running on strained infrastructure right now while other tools operate without incident.
The Migration Wave#
Claude.ai now lets you import your ChatGPT memory directly from settings. Anthropic built that feature with purpose, and the timing tells you something about how they see the market.
A number of developers left OpenAI’s products after the Stargate announcement. Some didn’t want their daily tools tied to autonomous weapons contracting. Others just followed the momentum. Claude Code’s user numbers climbed, which put more load on infrastructure already under political pressure.
Whether any of the usage drain traces back to deliberate attacks on Anthropic’s servers, I can’t confirm from the outside. It’s speculation, and I want to be clear about that. But the context (a public standoff with a powerful government institution, combined with a user surge) makes infrastructure pressure of all kinds more plausible than it would have been six months ago.
Does Anthropic Know?#
Yes. And the evidence is in their own actions.
The GitHub issues flagging the usage drain are filed directly on Anthropic’s repo. Their engineering team sees every one. The decision to double limits through March 27 was not a coincidence. It was a direct response to the volume of complaints hitting Reddit, X, and their own issue tracker within days. Companies at this scale have people whose job is to monitor exactly that.
The harder question is bandwidth. A team simultaneously managing an existential legal fight with the Pentagon, an infrastructure surge from new users, and a billing bug that’s hard to reproduce cleanly is a team with limited capacity even when fully informed. Knowing about a problem and having the space to fix it properly are two different things. The doubled limits are the fastest lever they could pull without a proper fix in place.
The Stakes Are Existential#
Anthropic is not yet profitable. Google ↗ has invested $2B and Amazon ↗ $4B. A “supply chain risk” designation would cut off government contracts and create pressure on those investors. Both Google Cloud and AWS have their own federal contracts that a high-profile association with a designated “supply chain risk” could complicate. This is not a PR dispute. The company’s ability to keep operating is on the line.
The irony: Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI ↗ specifically over AI safety disagreements. They are now being threatened by their own government for maintaining those same safety standards.
If you’re on Claude’s paid plans ↗ ($100 or $200 a month) and your limits drain in two hours, you deserve an explanation. “We’re doubling limits temporarily” is not one. It’s a patch.
What Happens Next#
The case is being heard in a California federal court. No ruling date has been confirmed publicly, but the judge’s early comments suggest the court is taking the “supply chain risk” designation seriously as an overreach.
Two outcomes matter beyond Anthropic itself. If the Pentagon wins, every AI company operating in the U.S. faces the same demand: remove your safety restrictions or lose government access. The pressure would cascade quickly given how much of the AI industry depends on federal contracts and cloud revenue. If Anthropic wins, it creates legal precedent that private companies can hold the line on specific use cases even under government pressure, and it opens space for actual legislation on autonomous weapons and AI surveillance, something 69% of Americans say they want ↗ according to polling cited by Al Jazeera.
Follow the case through court filings on CourtListener ↗ and coverage from The Register ↗ if you want to track it directly.
My Take#
I’m going to keep using Claude Code. The usage issues are frustrating, but the company’s position on autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance is defensible. Plenty of AI tools exist with no restrictions on either use case. I’d rather wait out a broken session limit than use one of them.
I understand the Pentagon’s argument too. Institutional oversight exists for a reason, and private companies unilaterally deciding what the military can and can’t do with a product sets a complicated precedent in the other direction. This is a genuinely hard problem, not a clean villain story.
But when a government labels its own citizen company using the same designation reserved for adversary nations, that’s worth paying attention to regardless of where you land on the underlying policy question.
The bug you noticed in your session usage is real. The context around it is bigger than the bug.