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.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
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?
