Claude Opus 4.6 rate limits and quotas are managed through Anthropic’s API policies, which include both spend limits (monthly or organizational caps) and rate limits (requests per time window). You should treat these as part of your production design: even if you can handle high traffic, upstream limits can throttle you, so you need graceful degradation, retries with backoff, and user-facing messaging when capacity is constrained.
In practice, you’ll want a multi-layer throttling strategy. First, enforce your own per-user and per-tenant rate limits to prevent a single customer from saturating your quota. Second, implement request prioritization: interactive UI requests should have higher priority than background jobs. Third, build fallbacks: if Opus 4.6 is rate-limited, you can queue non-urgent jobs, shorten context, or reduce output size. Always log rate-limit responses with correlation IDs so you can diagnose spikes.
Retrieval can also reduce quota pressure because it reduces token volume per request. If you use Milvus or managed Zilliz Cloud to select only a handful of relevant chunks, you’ll spend fewer tokens per call and often achieve the same user outcome. That lets you serve more users under the same spend and rate ceilings.