A federal lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California is accusing Anthropic of misleading customers about the usage allowances on its two most expensive Claude subscription tiers, claiming the actual limits fall well short of what was advertised.
Karl Kahn, a Washington, D.C.-based customer, is the named plaintiff. After starting with Claude for personal tasks and eventually relying on it for intensive coding work, he upgraded to the Max 20x plan in April. Within weeks, he was hitting weekly usage ceilings he did not expect. According to the complaint, a single five-hour coding session consumed 15 percent of his weekly allowance, leaving him to choose between stopping work, rationing usage, or paying more to continue.
Anthropic’s subscription ladder starts with Claude Pro at roughly $17 to $20 per month. The Max 5x plan costs $100 per month, and the Max 20x plan costs $200 per month. Both premium tiers are marketed explicitly around multipliers, promising five and 20 times the usage of the Pro plan, respectively. The lawsuit argues that internal emails Anthropic sent to different subscriber tiers last July, explaining expected weekly usage for specific models, demonstrate that the real caps are considerably lower than those figures suggest.
The complaint is seeking class-action status covering customers who purchased either plan since April 2025, and is also asking the court to find that Anthropic’s marketing of the plans constitutes fraud.
Anthropic declined to comment.
The lawsuit arrives at an awkward moment. Anthropic is already navigating a separate $1.5 billion class-action copyright settlement tied to allegations that it used pirated material to train its AI models. The company is also reportedly preparing for a potential IPO, putting it in a position where scrutiny of its business practices carries added weight.
Beyond the litigation, some users have reported far steeper financial consequences from the plan’s overage structure. Once the cap is reached, additional charges can accumulate rapidly, and at least one account documents a single month of heavy use resulting in a bill of roughly $50,000.
Businesses and individual power users are actively deciding how much to spend on AI tools, and the gap between advertised capability and real-world performance is emerging as a flashpoint across the industry. Anthropic introduced the Max tiers specifically to address complaints from Pro subscribers who felt consistently throttled, but the lawsuit suggests that fix may have created its own set of problems.
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