Anthropic is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging the company misled subscribers about usage limits on its premium Claude Max plans, which cost $100 and $200 per month. The suit was filed Monday in the Northern District of California by Washington D.C.-based user Karl Kahn, as per Wall Street Journal.
Anthropic markets Claude Max 5x at $100 per month and Max 20x at $200 per month, promising five and twenty times the token allowance of the base Claude Pro subscription, which costs $20 per month. The lawsuit alleges the actual usage delivered falls far short of those multipliers, and that Anthropic’s pricing model makes it nearly impossible for subscribers to determine how and where their tokens are being consumed.
Kahn says he upgraded to the Max 20x plan in April after beginning to use Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding tool, but quickly began hitting weekly usage limits. According to the complaint, one five-hour coding session consumed 15% of his entire weekly allowance. The suit alleges Anthropic sent emails to Max subscribers outlining expected token allowances, then adjusted those limits after purchase without clear communication. It also claims Anthropic’s own usage disclosures are vague, stating only that message limits “will vary based on message length” and other factors, without giving subscribers a way to audit their actual consumption.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of all Claude Max subscribers since the plans launched in April 2025, when Anthropic introduced the tier specifically to address complaints from Claude Pro users who felt constantly throttled. Anthropic declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The case lands during an unusually difficult stretch for Anthropic, arriving just days after the US government forced the company to suspend public access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over national security concerns, and after Amazon reportedly flagged security concerns about the models to federal officials. Anthropic is also separately navigating a $1.5 billion class-action copyright settlement related to allegations it trained its models on pirated content.
Anthropic is not alone in facing scrutiny over AI subscription economics. Unlike traditional software subscriptions such as Netflix or Spotify, where serving an additional customer costs a company very little, every AI prompt consumes real computing resources, making usage-based pricing a persistent tension across the industry. Google has responded by publishing hard daily prompt limits for Gemini, while OpenAI and Perplexity offer comparable $100 to $200 monthly tiers facing similar usage pressure.
