Claude Code Compacts and Continues Instead of Stopping With "Usage credits required for 1M context"
Claude CodeClaude Code 2.1.311 fixes standard-context sessions that halted with the message "Usage credits required for 1M context" once a request ran past 200K tokens. Claude Code now compacts the conversation and keeps going. Users on standard context no longer lose their place when a long session crosses the 200K line.
Key Takeaways
- Standard-context sessions no longer stop with "Usage credits required for 1M context" when a request goes over 200K tokens.
- Claude Code now compacts the conversation automatically and continues, so work is not interrupted mid-task.
- The 200K line is the trigger, so the fix targets long-running sessions that have grown large.
- The same release makes compaction more reliable: if a compaction reply has no summary, Claude Code usually asks once more before replacing the conversation.
- The release also stops stale MEMORY.md and CLAUDE.md content from showing up right after automatic compaction.
- It ships in Claude Code 2.1.311, released October 26, 2026.
The problem
Long Claude Code sessions can grow past 200K tokens. In standard-context sessions, a request that ran over that size used to stop with the error "Usage credits required for 1M context". The session halted at that point, which interrupted work in the middle of a task and left the user to deal with the long conversation by hand.
The fix
Claude Code 2.1.311 changes this. When a request in a standard-context session runs over 200K tokens, Claude Code now compacts the conversation and continues instead of stopping. The user does not need to trigger compaction manually or restart the session.
Why it matters
The change removes a hard stop from one of the most common situations in long agentic work: a session that has simply grown large. It also fits the compaction improvements in the same release. When the model's reply to a compaction request contains no summary, Claude Code now usually asks for the summary once more before replacing the conversation, which makes automatic compaction more dependable.
Who is affected
The fix applies to standard-context sessions. Sessions that already run with a 1M-token context window are not described by this note.