Anthropic Sued Over Allegations of False Advertising in Claude Max Subscription Usage Limits
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic is facing a new lawsuit alleging it misled subscribers about the limitations of using the Claude program. Claude is an AI assistant designed for coding, writing, research and data analysis.
The lawsuit alleges that the actual rate limits placed on subscribers to 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 certain window of time, like a “chat budget.”
The complaint says the actual 20x usage cap, which costs $200 per month and promises 20 times the usage cap of the Pro package, amounts to “only six to eight times the usage of Pro.” The Max 5x plan, which costs $100 a month, is said to deliver “only three and a half times the performance of Pro” instead of the promised five times. Claude Pro’s subscription tier costs between $17 and $20 per month.
The plaintiff, Karl Khan, filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Sunday. Khan initially contacted Claude for personal reasons before deciding to use it for coding work, upgrading his subscription twice to the Max 20x program in April 2026.
He said he quickly discovered that he used to use about 20% of his weekly data in one 5-hour coding sprint. Khan said he compared his experience in different subscription categories and concluded that there was a discrepancy between the advertising and the reality of Claude’s usage rate limits.
As concerns grow about the rising cost of subscriptions to the AI model and the lack of transparency of AI usage limits for commercial customers, Claude’s many models continue to be accepted by programmers and so-called vibe codes.
The Trump administration recently foreign governments and banned corporations from using Anthropic’s most powerful AI tools and temporarily shutting down all models until they comply with the new decision.
Anthropic continues to rush tools to its users before then its first public offering. Its rivals are doing the same — SpaceX just launched the largest IPO in history, targeting OpenAI hit the public market soon.
A representative for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Claude’s ambiguous usage limits
It’s unclear what the usage limits for the Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x plans actually are — this is addressed in the filing, which argues that Anthropic’s website is “a black box, without a meaningful explanation of how usage is calculated.”
The company’s blog post gives its customers advice on how to manage the use of large projects and explains that the entire system is still affected by both per-session and weekly usage limits, but no blog post explains precisely how many alerts each plan allows the customer to send to Claude during the appropriate time windows. The lawsuit also alleges that Anthropic does not properly define what constitutes a single session.
Customers who reach their limit on premium plans are instructed to spend more 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] understanding.”
The complaint states that “many subscribers reported their frustration and complained about it [Anthropic] engaged in playing and switching,” including testimonials from frustrated customers. At least one popular Reddit thread is full of similar stories, where many registered users were surprised by the ban. The original poster described the premium plan as “very misleading.”
The complaint seeks class-action status for anyone who purchased and used Anthropic’s Max 5x or Max 20x subscription plans beginning in April 2025. While we don’t yet know the extent of the damages sought in this case, the complaint states that “the amount in dispute exceeds only $5 million in total costs.”
