Ask HN: Is weird it that Anthropic raised my API limit from $500/mo to $200k?

2 points by noduerme 3mo ago ↗ HN

So a few weeks ago I spun up an openclaw instance and gave it a Claude API key. I was coaching it through turning an old client/server codebase into a headless one (something I wrote 15 years ago for projecting sports gambling). When I'd spent about $250 in tokens last week, I got a little worried that maybe I'd have to raise my $500/mo API limit, but I decided to wait on that. A few days ago when I hit $300 in spend, lo and behold my limit was raised to $1000/mo. Great.

Today I checked my spend again and found that my limit had been raised to $200,000 per month. I'm not complaining, but that seems a little strange to me. My total all-time spend is about $400 right now. I don't think they've checked my credit score. Not to sound paranoid, but ... okay, I'm going to sound paranoid for a second. Is Claude reporting back that my sports prediction software actually works? Who the ** gets a $199,000 increase in their monthly limit when they pass $400 in spend?

To put it another way, they just gave me a limit that surpasses my annual net income. Or is that just the normal jump, from $1k to $200k that's baked into their billing system based on some frequency of usage metric?

2 comments

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verdverm 3mo ago ↗

That is quite the jump. Google Vertex Ai has spend based auto upgrades and I've seen it elsewhere (cannot recall at the moment). So the first is pretty normal, the second seems like another bug (they've had a lot this week and it's not even half done)

davydm 3mo ago ↗

What even is the point of a limit if it's just going to auto-raise? Now you can end up in the situation of owing that. Perhaps you forget that the agent is running in the background somewhere for a while. Or perhaps you end up with a vulnerable dependency that does that for you.

Limits are there to prevent unwanted behaviors, either accidental or malicious.