Image: Engadget / engadget.com Anthropic Hit With Class-Action Over Claude Max Usage Claims
Plaintiffs say Anthropic's $100 and $200 per month Max plans don't deliver anywhere near the advertised 5x and 20x usage boosts, and that the real limits are buried behind multiple support links.
A class-action lawsuit filed September 8 in the Northern District of California accuses Anthropic of misleading customers about how much usage they actually get from its Max subscription plans.
The complaint targets the Max 5x tier at $100 per month and the Max 20x tier at $200 per month. Both are marketed with the promise of dramatically more Claude usage than the $17-per-month Pro plan. The lawsuit argues those claims don’t hold up once you account for usage caps that weren’t disclosed upfront.
What the suit claims
Anthropic markets Max as offering five or twenty times more usage than Pro within a given session window, which resets every five hours. The problem, plaintiffs say, is that weekly caps exist on top of that, and those caps were added months after Max launched in April 2025. The lawsuit claims the Max 5x tier delivers about 3.5 times Pro usage in practice, not five times. The Max 20x tier, supposedly four times more generous than 5x, works out to roughly six to eight times Pro when weekly limits are factored in.
“This is hard for consumers — they don’t know what’s in the black box,” said Monica Vaca, one of two attorneys representing the plaintiffs. Vaca’s argument is that understanding the real limits requires clicking through multiple links in Anthropic’s support documentation, rather than being disclosed where the subscription is sold.
The lead plaintiff is Karl Kahn, a Washington D.C.-based Claude subscriber. The filing puts the amount in controversy at more than $5 million, excluding attorneys’ fees.
Not the first complaint
This isn’t the first time Anthropic has faced legal scrutiny over Max. An individual subscriber filed a federal lawsuit in June 2025 raising similar concerns. That case is still pending. The September 8 filing attempts to broaden the claim into a class, arguing many Max subscribers have been similarly misled.
The pattern the suit describes is familiar in subscription software: usage limits exist but aren’t front and center, and the advertised multipliers don’t reflect real-world behavior once you hit the caps.
Context
The timing is notable. Anthropic is preparing for an IPO expected later this year, according to Bloomberg. A class action over misleading marketing on a core consumer product is the kind of liability that prospective shareholders will want to assess. Max is Anthropic’s premium tier and a significant revenue contributor at $100 to $200 per month per subscriber.
Anthropic has not publicly commented on the filing.