Anthropic faces lawsuit alleging false advertising over Claude Max subscription usage limits

Anthropic Sued Over Alleged False Advertising on Claude Max Subscription Usage Limits

Expertise Video gaming, computer hardware, laptops, home energy, home internet The artificial intelligence company Anthropic is facing a newly proposed class action lawsuit that alleges it's misleading subscribers over plan usage limits for Claude. Claude is an AI assistant designed for coding, writing, research and data analysis. The suit alleges that the actual rate limits imposed on subscribers to the two most expensive paid tiers, the Max 5x and Max 20x, are far below what the company advertises. Usage limits, according to Anthropic, refer to how much users can work with Claude during a specific window of time, like a "conversation budget." The complaint argues that the real usage cap for the 20x, which costs $200 per month and promises 20 times the usage cap of the Pro package, amounts to "just six to eight times the usage of Pro." The Max 5x plan, which costs $100 per month, purportedly delivers "just three-and-a-half times the usage of Pro" instead of the promised five times. The Claude Pro subscription tier costs between $17 and $20 per month. The plaintiff, Karl Khan, filed the suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Sunday. Khan first tinkered with Claude for personal reasons before deciding to use it for coding work, upgrading his subscription twice to the Max 20x plan by April 2026. He quickly found he was frequently using up nearly 20% of his weekly data allocation in a single 5-hour-long coding sprint. Khan compared his experience across the different subscription tiers and concluded that there was a discrepancy between the advertising and the reality of Claude's usage rate limits. Even as concerns proliferate about the rising costs of AI model subscriptions and the lack of transparency of AI usage limits for commercial customers, several of the Claude models continue to be adopted by programmers and so-called vibe coders. The Trump administration recently banned foreign governments and companies from using Anthropic's most powerful AI tools and has temporarily shut down entire models until they comply with the new ruling. Anthropic continues to race out tools to its users ahead of its initial public offering. Its competitors are doing the same -- SpaceX just executed the largest IPO in history, with OpenAI primed to hit the public market soon. A representative from Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Claude's ambiguous usage limits It remains unclear what the usage limit for Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x plans actually is -- this is addressed in the filing, which argues that Anthropic's website "is a black box, without any meaningful description of how usage is calculated." The company's blog posts offer its customers advice on how to manage usage for big projects and explain that every plan is still affected by both per-session and weekly usage limits, but there is no blog post explaining exactly how many prompts each plan allows a customer to send to Claude during the relevant windows of time. The lawsuit also alleges that Anthropic doesn't clearly define what constitutes a single session. Customers who reach their rate limit on premium plans are prompted to spend more money on credits to continue using Claude. Anthropic wrote in a blog post that it reserves the right to "limit your usage in other ways, such as weekly and monthly caps or model and feature usage, at [its] discretion." The complaint states that "many subscribers have reported their frustration and complained that [Anthropic] has engaged in a bait and switch," including testimonies from frustrated customers. I personally found at least one popular Reddit thread filled with similar stories, where multiple subscribed users were surprised by usage bottlenecks. The original poster described the premium plan as "extremely misleading." The complaint seeks class-action status for anyone who has purchased and used Anthropic's Max 5x or Max 20x subscription plans since April 2025. While we don't yet know the scope of the damages for which restitution is being sought in this case, the complaint states that the "amount in controversy exceeds the sum of $5 million exclusive in costs."

Anthropic hit with lawsuit over its Claude Max usage limits - Engadget

A Claude subscriber has sued Anthropic, alleging the company mislead consumers about the usage limits of its Max plans. Per The Wall Street Journal, Karl Kahn, a Washington DC-based resident, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday accusing Anthropic of overselling how much he could use Claude. The lawsuit claims that the actual usage caps of Anthropic's Max 5x and Max 20x tiers are hard to determine and appear lower than the limits the company advertises on its website and elsewhere. Anthropic offers three different paid tiers for individuals. The company's most affordable plan, Claude Pro, starts at $17 per month and "offers at least five times the usage per session compared to our free service" during peak hours. "The number of messages you can send will vary based on message length, including the length of files you attach, the length of your current conversation, and the model or feature you use," Anthropic writes on its website. Since April 2025, the company has also offered Max 5 and 20x plans, which promise up to five and 20 times higher usage caps than the Pro package. The two plans cost $100 and $200 per month, respectively. "The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage," the lawsuit alleges. After he began using Claude Code, Khan upgraded to the Max 20x plan in April of this year, but quickly found himself hitting his weekly usage limits. One five-hour session saw him go through 15 percent of his weekly allowance. The lawsuit is seeking class action-status on behalf of other US consumers who purchased a Max subscription since Anthropic began offering them last year. Anthropic declined to comment. Anthropic's rate limits are a frequent topic of discussion on Reddit, with one user recently complaining about how they blew past their five-hour limit after just a single Claude Code prompt. Last July, the company imposed weekly rate limits on Claude Code usage in response to users who had been running the coding agent "continuously in the background, 24/7." All large language models operate on a currency known as tokens. When you type a question into Claude's prompt bar, it converts words, groups of characters and punctuation into numbers that map to different patterns and relationships Anthropic's models learned in training. For a model to generate a response, there are both input and output costs, and those can vary greatly depending on the complexity of a prompt. The lawsuit highlights a long-growing disconnect between consumer expectations and the actual cost of providing AI inference. Traditional software subscription models don't map neatly, if at all, to how much compute LLMs require to work at scale. Right now, venture capitalists are offsetting those costs, and if anything, the problem is likely to become more acute when Anthropic and OpenAI go public.

Anthropic Accused of Misleading Users Over Soaring AI Costs in New Lawsuit

Anthropic has been grifting its highest-paying users, a new class action lawsuit alleges. Filed Monday in the Northern District of California and first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit claims that Anthropic has been misleading consumers with its marketing for Claude Max 5x and Max 20x subscription plans. Respectively, the plans cost $100 and $200 per month and are supposed to come with five and twenty times the token allowances as the less expensive Claude Pro subscription. But the plaintiff behind the lawsuit, a Washington D.C.-based user named Karl Kahn, argues the actual limits seem to be much lower, and Anthropic's pricing model makes it difficult to determine exactly how and where users' tokens are being spent. The lawsuit claims that Anthropic sent emails to Max 5x and Max 20x subscribers in July of last year outlining the token allowances they could expect every week, and that those were "far below the advertised amount of usage," according to a quote from the filing included in the Journal's report. Anthropic did not immediately respond to Gizmodo's request for comment on the new lawsuit. Costs and complaints Khan's allegations are the latest in a flurry of complaints against the swelling costs of using frontier AI models. Companies like Amazon and Uber have recently taken steps to limit employees' use of AI, citing the technology's price tag, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called the financial burden of AI "a huge issue" facing enterprise customers. The new lawsuit also underscores the complexity that often comes with trying to translate vagaries like tokens and usage windows into concrete monetary values. In response to the rising tide of complaints, developers like Anthropic and OpenAI have faced pressure to cut down costs for users, even as the price of training new AI models also continues to climb. Open-source models like DeepSeek have meanwhile been growing in popularity as businesses and individuals get priced out of using proprietary models. Models have also been getting more token-hungry as they become more "agentic," or autonomous. Asking Claude to rewrite a work email in a more professional tone doesn't run through much of a user's token allowance, but it's a much different story for complex, long-running tasks, like designing a website landing page, which could require several series of steps, the deployment of sub-agents, and therefore much more computing power. Shortly after the debut of Anthropic's Fable 5 early last week -- a model which Anthropic specifically touted for its agentic capabilities -- some users started complaining that they were burning through their usage windows far faster than with earlier models. An underdog in the AI race, not so long ago, Anthropic recently surpassed OpenAI as the highest-valued startup in the world. Its fame has also swelled following its very public dispute with the U.S. Department of War over the use of its AI in autonomous weapons systems and other military technology. On Friday, the company was ordered by the federal government to cut off access to Fable 5 (along with another powerful model called Mythos 5) for all foreign nationals in the U.S. and abroad, due to alleged cybersecurity concerns. The affordability angle Meanwhile, Anthropic's competitors have rushed to take advantage of the complaints being leveled against the cost of its Claude chatbot. During its most recent Build developer's conference earlier this month, for example, Microsoft unveiled a new AI model called MAI-Thinking-1 (along with six others), which company AI lead Mustafa Suleyman said performs comparably to Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 for a lower cost. Suleyman also told Bloomberg that "many people are urgently looking for alternatives" to Anthropic's expensive models. Similarly, OpenAI -- which, along with Anthropic, is expected to move forward with its initial public offering later this year -- appears to be leaning into affordability as a sales tactic as it reportedly considers significant cuts to its current token prices.

Anthropic lawsuit claims it oversold $200 Claude plans

A Washington customer is seeking refunds and class-action status, claiming Claude's priciest tiers deliver far less than the "5x" and "20x" they advertise. Anthropic declined to comment, and the allegations are unproven. An Anthropic lawsuit filed in California this week accuses the AI company of overselling its priciest Claude subscriptions. The complaint, brought by Washington, D.C. customer Karl Kahn, claims Anthropic's "Max 5x" ($100 a month) and "Max 20x" ($200 a month) plans deliver far less usage than advertised, and asks a court to make the company refund subscribers. The plans are sold on a simple promise: five or twenty times the usage of Claude's base Pro plan, which costs $17 to $20 a month. The suit says the reality falls well short, and is nearly impossible for users to measure. "The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage," it states, and it asks the court to find Anthropic's marketing fraudulent. It seeks class-action status for everyone who bought the plans since April 2024. What the Anthropic lawsuit alleges Kahn's story is a coder's. He started on Claude for casual use, then moved to heavy programming and upgraded to the $200 Max 20x tier in April. A single five-hour session, the complaint says, burned through 15 per cent of his weekly allowance, and the caps began cutting him off soon after he subscribed, leaving him to halt work, ration his prompts, or pay for more. At the centre of the case are emails Anthropic allegedly sent in July 2025, spelling out, per model, how much weekly use each tier should expect. Anthropic declined to comment, and the claims are unproven. This is one customer's complaint, and no class has been certified. It is also worth being precise: the weekly limits themselves are real and not secret. Anthropic introduced them in 2025 to rein in its heaviest users, a move that annoyed subscribers at the time. The lawsuit's harder claim is not that limits exist, but that they were sold dishonestly. Why a subscription spat matters This is one of the first times grumbling over opaque AI usage caps has reached a courtroom, and that is the real story. AI subscriptions have become a routine line in household budgets, big enough now to draw the same scrutiny once aimed at creeping streaming bills. Consumer lawyers are watching closely how AI companies describe what a plan actually buys. There is an awkward contrast inside Anthropic's own products. Its enterprise plans come with granular spend caps and usage analytics, the very tools that make consumption legible, while the consumer tiers at the heart of this suit are the opaque ones. The timing is pointed, too. It lands as Anthropic and its rivals eye public listings, and days after a US government order pulled its top models from foreign users. A subscription dispute is small next to that. But it asks a question every AI company will soon have to answer in plain terms: what, exactly, does your plan buy?

Anthropic Faces Lawsuit Over Allegedly Misleading Claude AI Pricing

The lawsuit seeks damages, restitution, injunctive relief, and class certification. Anthropic is facing a class action lawsuit alleging the AI company misled customers about the amount of usage included with its premium Claude Max subscription plans. The complaint, filed June 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by customer Karl Kahn, seeks to represent other Claude subscribers who purchased the company's Max plans and alleges Anthropic misled customers about the amount of usage included with its premium subscription tiers. In the lawsuit, Kahn said he subscribed to Claude Pro in June 2025 before upgrading to Max 5x in January, and Max 20x in April of this year. Kahn alleges that he overpaid for both subscriptions, received less usage than Anthropic advertised, and at times purchased additional usage after reaching plan limits. According to Vaca Daffan LLP Founding Partner Kati Daffan, who is representing Kahn, the case is rooted in established consumer protection laws that prohibit companies from misleading users about the products and services they sell. "This is a really good type of case for a class action, because the law is very clear that companies have to be honest about their advertising and marketing," Daffan told Decrypt. "If they're not, they can be held liable, need to change their ways, and refund money to people. Civil actions like this are brought every day against companies that misrepresent something about their product or service." Anthropic offers several subscription tiers for individual users, from a free plan with limited usage to its paid Pro and Max plans. Its Pro plan costs $20 per month or $200 per year and is intended for regular users, while Max is aimed at customers who use Claude more heavily. Max 5x costs $100 per month and is marketed as providing five times the Pro plan's usage capacity per session. Max 20x costs $200 per month and is marketed as providing 20 times the Pro plan's usage capacity per session. Anthropic says Max subscribers also receive priority access to new models and features, access to Claude Code, and higher usage limits meant to reduce interruptions during longer workflows. The complaint alleges Anthropic did not clearly explain how usage was measured, making it difficult for subscribers to determine whether they were receiving the amount of access promised under the Max plans. According to Daffan, the lack of transparency may help explain why no similar lawsuits had previously been filed, arguing that consumers were left without the information needed to verify whether they were receiving the advertised level of service. "It's really not easy for a normal consumer to know if they're getting the amount they were promised, or if they're not, because that information simply isn't provided," she said. "So you can see a lot of people expressing on Reddit and other boards that they feel they might not have received what they were promised, but it took a lot of connecting the dots and work to piece together what was actually going on here." The lawsuit seeks damages, restitution, injunctive and declaratory relief, attorneys' fees, and costs, and asks the court to certify a class action on behalf of all U.S. residents who purchased or upgraded to a Claude Max 5x or Max 20x subscription through Claude.com or the Claude desktop app between April 9, 2025, and the present. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt. The Claude maker is not alone in marketing premium AI subscriptions based on higher usage limits. OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity all offer plans that cost between $100 and $200 per month, promising expanded access to advanced AI models and increased usage allowances. The lawsuit comes days after Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, its most advanced AI models to date. Mythos 5 was restricted to approved cybersecurity organizations, critical infrastructure operators, government partners, and selected researchers, while Fable 5 was released for broader public use with additional safeguards. The rollout quickly drew criticism from some users and developers over usage limits, "invisible safeguards," and restrictions, and the model's tendency to consume subscription allowances more quickly than earlier Claude models. Days later, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns related to a potential jailbreak vulnerability.

Anthropic sued over alleged misleading Claude Max usage caps

A federal lawsuit was filed against Anthropic on Monday, alleging misleading advertising related to the usage limits of its Claude Max subscription plans. The lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of other consumers who purchased the Max subscription since its introduction. According to The Wall Street Journal, Karl Kahn, a resident of Washington DC, claims that the actual usage caps for Anthropic's Max 5x and Max 20x tiers are significantly lower than what the company advertises. Anthropic offers three paid subscription tiers: Claude Pro, beginning at $17 per month; Max 5x at $100 per month; and Max 20x at $200 per month. The Pro plan claims to provide at least five times the usage per session compared to the free service, while the Max plans promise five and twenty times the Pro plan's usage limits. The lawsuit contends that Kahn, after upgrading to the Max 20x plan in April, quickly reached his weekly usage limits. He reported using 15 percent of his allowed usage within a five-hour session. Kahn's experience is echoed by other users on Reddit, who have expressed frustrations about unexpectedly hitting usage caps. In response to user behavior, Anthropic imposed weekly rate limits on Claude Code usage last July, targeting those who ran the service continuously. The complaint further highlights the discrepancies between consumer expectations and the actual costs associated with AI inference, indicating a disconnect in how subscription models apply to large language models. All large language models operate on a token system, converting textual input into numerical representations for processing. The costs incurred depend on the complexity of the prompts. The lawsuit reportedly reflects a broader issue in the industry, as traditional software models do not align with the computational demands of AI technology. Anthropic declined to comment on the ongoing litigation. As the company and other players in the AI industry, such as OpenAI, move towards public offerings, concerns regarding the economics of AI inference are expected to grow.

Claude Max Customer Sues Anthropic Over Usage Limits | PYMNTS.com

The plans cost $100 and $200 a month respectively, and promised five and 20 times the usage of Anthropic's base Claude Pro tier. The federal lawsuit, filed on behalf of Washington, D.C.-based customer Karl Kahn, alleged the usage limits were difficult to understand and changed without clear notice. The suit is seeking class-action status on behalf of users like Kahn who used the plans since last April, the WSJ reported. Anthropic declined to comment. Heavy users and developers who rely on Claude for coding and professional work have raised similar complaints. The lawsuit points to a growing gap between what customers expect from a $100 or $200 monthly plan and the usage they actually receive. Anthropic is not the only company facing this issue. Usage limits have become a broader challenge across the artificial intelligence (AI) industry as providers manage rising compute costs. Demand for coding assistants, AI agents and long-context reasoning workloads has grown sharply. Every prompt a user sends, and every response a model generates, consumes processing power that costs Anthropic money. That makes AI subscriptions different from traditional software subscriptions like Netflix or Spotify, where serving an additional customer costs the company very little. Serving an additional AI customer, particularly a heavy one, costs real money every time they use the product. As a result, rate limits, daily caps and throttling have become more common across AI services. Google now publishes hard daily prompt limits for Gemini. Anthropic has also moved to block third-party tools that let users run high-volume workloads at flat consumer rates. PYMNTS reported on Thursday (June 11) that Google cut its entry-level AI Plus plan from $7.99 to $4.99 a month and lowered its top-tier plan from $250 to $200. OpenAI is reportedly considering its own price cuts. Meta has begun testing paid AI subscriptions for the first time. Competition among Anthropic, OpenAI and Google has intensified as each company tries to attract more users. At the same time, those companies are managing the cost of serving their heaviest users. Anthropic's $200 Claude Code plan allows power users to consume $600 to $1,500 worth of API-priced compute for a flat monthly fee. Lower prices bring in more subscribers, but the users most likely to sign up for higher tiers are also the most expensive to serve. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

Anthropic hit with lawsuit over how it marketed Claude Max subscriptions: Here is what happened

"The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage," the lawsuit alleges. Anthropic is facing a lawsuit from a Claude subscriber. The user claims that the company misled customers about the usage limits of its premium Claude Max subscription plans. As per reports, Washington DC resident Karl Kahn alleged in the lawsuit that Anthropic promised more usage than customers actually receive under its Claude Max plans. The lawsuit claims that the real usage limits for the Max 5x and Max 20x subscriptions are difficult to understand and appear to be lower than what Anthropic advertises. Also read: Elon Musk loses again to OpenAI as court throws out xAI trade secrets case Currently, Anthropic offers three paid subscription plans. The most affordable option is Claude Pro, which starts at $17 per month. The company says the plan provides "at least five times the usage per session compared to our free service" during busy periods. Anthropic also notes that usage depends on several factors, including message length, attached files, conversation history, and the model being used. In April 2025, Anthropic introduced two higher-priced plans: Max 5x and Max 20x. These subscriptions cost $100 and $200 per month, respectively. The company says they offer up to five times and 20 times higher usage limits than the Pro plan. Also read: OpenAI faces investigation over ChatGPT's impact on children and vulnerable users However, the lawsuit claims users do not actually receive the amount of access suggested by the company's marketing. "The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage," the lawsuit alleges. Kahn upgraded to the Max 20x plan after starting to use Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant. He claims he quickly began running into weekly usage restrictions. According to the lawsuit, one coding session lasting about five hours consumed 15 percent of his entire weekly allowance. The lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of other US customers who purchased a Claude Max subscription since the plans were launched. Also read: Anthropic wants Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 back online, sends execs to US for talks Meanwhile, Anthropic is also dealing with a separate controversy which involves its latest AI models. Last week, the company launched Claude Fable 5, its first Mythos-class AI model for general use, alongside Mythos 5. However, just days after the rollout, Anthropic pulled access to both models globally due to an export control order issued by the US government. While the company complied with the order, the company disagreed with the decision. In a blog post, Anthropic said, "We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers." "We apologise for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible."