[FEATURE] Apply the May 6 Claude Code 5-hour rate limit doubling to Cowork sessions
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
- [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)
Problem Statement
Thank you for the May 6, 2026 announcement on the doubled 5-hour rate limits and the SpaceX compute deal. These are huge wins for heavy users.
However, the announcement applies to Claude Code's 5-hour rate limits on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Cowork session limits are not addressed, and as a Japan-based Team plan user whose primary workflow runs on Cowork (not Claude Code CLI), I have observed no change to Cowork session capacity since May 6.
My day-to-day work runs inside Cowork. I run specialist long-running agents in Cowork Projects (Marketing Director, Brand Director, Multi-agent Harness research, etc. — see #49649). The 5-hour CLI doubling is excellent news for my engineering teammate — but it passes Cowork-first users by entirely. The May 6 announcement implicitly sets a "doubled capacity for paid plans" expectation, but the surface that most matters to Cowork users is the one that didn't move.
Proposed Solution
Please consider extending the 5-hour rate limit doubling (and, where applicable, the peak-hour throttle removal) to Cowork sessions on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, mirroring the parity that the May 6 announcement implicitly set across paid plans.
If Cowork session limits are technically a separate axis from Claude Code's 5-hour windows, even a parallel announcement of "Cowork session capacity has been increased by Nx for these plans" would let us feel the compute investment we've been hearing about.
Alternative Solutions
The only current workaround for a Cowork-first user is to migrate workloads into Claude Code CLI sessions to take advantage of the 2x increase, which defeats the purpose of choosing Cowork as the home for long-running specialist agents (see #49649).
Priority
High - Significant impact on productivity
Feature Category
Configuration and settings
Use Case Example
A typical workday: I run multiple Cowork Projects with specialist agents and a multi-agent harness for knowledge curation.
- Open Cowork in the morning, start a multi-agent harness session.
- Within ~3 hours of moderate work, the per-session usage bar approaches its ceiling.
- Pause for 1–2 hours, or switch to Claude Code CLI — where the May 6 doubling does apply.
Same plan tier. Different interface. Different reach of the May 6 announcement.
Additional Context
- Japan-based Team plan user.
- Primary workflow: Cowork Projects + multi-agent harness research, not Claude Code CLI.
- Related and adjacent reports:
- #57146 — Max 20x users reporting the May 6 doubling has not actually applied to Claude Code 5-hour windows (parallel "announcement vs experience" gap on the Code side).
- #49649 — My earlier request for model switching on existing Cowork tasks (also concerns long-running Cowork agents, opened 2026-04-17, still open).
- #16083 / #21943 / #33215 — Adjacent session-limit and usage-visibility requests.
- Industry context: Third-party guides note "a single Cowork task can use 10–50× the tokens of a Chat message" (NYCClaw, DevGent), so Cowork-first users feel the 5-hour window very differently from CLI users.
Cowork is the reason I run my company the way I do. Please let Cowork users feel the May 6 announcement too. 🙏
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