Anthropic lifts Claude API rate limits
Anthropic raised Claude API rate limits on June 26 so Sonnet and Haiku match Opus at every tier, cut usage tiers to three, and deprecated Opus 4.7 fast mode.
Anthropic made two changes to the Claude API this week, both noted in its release notes. On June 26 it raised rate limits across the board. Sonnet and Haiku now get the same per-tier ceilings as Opus, and the old ladder of usage tiers collapses into three: Start, Build, and Scale. Anthropic says most organizations land on a higher tier than before, nobody drops lower, and you do not have to change anything. Your current tier shows in the Claude Console.
The day before, on June 25, it deprecated fast mode for Claude Opus 4.7, scheduled for removal on July 24, 2026. After that date, any call to claude-opus-4-7 that sets speed: "fast" fails with an error, and the move is to switch to fast mode on Claude Opus 4.8.
What it means for you
The rate-limit change is the kind you want: if you were throttled on Sonnet or Haiku, you now have Opus-level headroom on the cheaper models, and you do not have to do anything. The fast-mode deprecation is the one with a deadline. If any of your tooling pins Opus 4.7 with fast mode, find it and move it to 4.8 before July 24, or those calls start failing. This is the second recent change to how Anthropic meters its API, after it paused an Agent SDK billing change. When you are picking which model tier to build on, our guide on choosing AI tools for a small business covers the trade-offs, and the GPT-5.6 preview shows the same cheaper-tier push from OpenAI.