AI Pulse · Frontier Labs Watch

OpenAI has put a five-hour usage cap back on Codex and Work for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, effective today. For several weeks, Plus users had only weekly limits, which meant someone could use a large share of their allowance in a single long session. Pro, Enterprise and Education plans aren’t affected.

OpenAI says the change is about smoothing compute demand and preventing a small number of casual users from exhausting their weekly quota at once. The practical message for operators is simpler. Even the biggest AI providers still have to ration access when demand spikes. If your team relies on ChatGPT Plus for coding, research, analysis or workflow work, don’t assume unlimited access will remain available just because it was available last month. Build important processes with clear usage expectations, fallback tools and plan-level choices that match the work being done.

It’s also a useful reminder that product limits can change faster than internal operating habits. A team may quietly build a daily process around a tool, then find its capacity or terms have shifted. This is the kind of thing we build into an AI command centre, tracking which tools support critical work, who depends on them and where a change in access could create a bottleneck.