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Artificial intelligence company Anthropic faces a new problem Proposed class action lawsuit Which it claims misleads subscribers about the plan’s usage limits for Cloud. Claude is an AI assistant designed for programming, writing, research, and data analysis.
The lawsuit alleges that the actual price limits imposed on subscribers in the two most expensive paid tiers, Max 5x and Max 20x, are much lower than what the company advertises. Usage limits, according to Anthropic, refer to how much users can work with Claude during a specific period of time, such as “Conversation budget“.
The real-world usage cap for 20X, which costs $200 per month and promises 20 times the Pro package’s maximum usage, amounts to “six to eight times the Pro usage limit alone,” the complaint says. The Max 5x plan, which costs $100 per month, allegedly delivers “only three and a half times the use of Pro” instead of the promised five times. Claude Pro’s subscription tier costs between $17 and $20 per month.
Prosecutor Karl Kahn The lawsuit was filed In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Sunday. Khan first tinkered with Cloud for personal reasons before deciding to use it for his programming work, and upgraded his subscription twice to the Max 20x plan by April 2026.
He soon discovered that he was often using approximately 20% of his weekly data allotment in a single 5-hour programming sprint. Khan compared his experience across different subscription levels and concluded that there was a discrepancy between the ad and the reality of Claude’s usage limits.
Even as concerns grow about the rising costs of AI model subscriptions and the lack of transparency in the limits of AI use for commercial clients, Many Claude models It is still adopted by programmers and so-called Vibe programmers.
The Trump administration recently Banning foreign governments and companies of using Anthropic’s most powerful AI tools and temporarily shut down entire models until they comply with the new ruling.
Anthropic continues to provide tools to its users in advance Initial public offering. Its competitors are doing the same, with SpaceX just carrying out the mission The largest IPO in historywith OpenAI equipped for Hit the general market soon.
A representative from Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Claude’s ambiguous usage limits
It’s still unclear what the actual usage limit is for the Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x plans – this is addressed in the filing, which says Anthropic’s website “is a black box, without any meaningful description of how usage is calculated”.
Company blog posts Providing advice to its clients About how to manage usage for larger projects and make it clear that every plan is still affected by both Usage limits per session and weeklybut there is no blog post explaining exactly how many claims each plan allows a customer to submit to Cloud during the relevant time periods. The lawsuit also alleges that Anthropic does not clearly define what constitutes a single session.
Customers who reach their price limit on premium plans are asked to do so Spend more money on loans To continue using Claude. Anthropic he wrote in a blog post It reserves the right to “limit your usage in other ways, such as weekly and monthly caps or form and feature usage, at its discretion.”
“Numerous subscribers reported frustration and complained that (Anthropic) engaged in a fraud and switch scam,” the complaint states, including testimonials from frustrated customers. I personally found At least one popular Reddit thread Filled with similar stories, where many subscribing users were surprised by usage bottlenecks. The original poster called the featured plan “deeply misleading.”
The complaint seeks a class action lawsuit 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 being sought in this case, the complaint states that “the amount in dispute exceeds $5 million exclusively for costs.”
