A federal class-action lawsuit filed Monday accuses Anthropic of misleading customers about the real usage limits on its high-end Claude AI subscriptions. The suit, brought on behalf of Washington D.C. subscriber Karl Kahn and others who bought the Max 5x and Max 20x plans since April 2025, claims the company oversold how much computing power buyers would actually receive.
The lawsuit - filed Monday in the Northern District of California on behalf of Washington DC resident Karl Kahn and others who subscribed to the plans since April 2025 - targets Anthropic's Max 5x and Max 20x tiers priced at $100 and $200 per month respectively. It accuses the company of misleading customers by advertising these plans as providing five and twenty times the usage capacity of the standard Pro subscription, when in reality the actual limits fall well short of those claims. The allegations draw heavily from emails Anthropic sent to subscribers in July 2025 that outlined the expected weekly usage allowances for each tier at the time.
According to the complaint, Kahn upgraded to the Max 20x plan in April of this year after increasing his reliance on Claude for coding work. He soon discovered he was exhausting his weekly limits rapidly, including burning through 15 percent of his allowance during a single five-hour session. The suit seeks refunds for affected customers and a judicial finding that Anthropic's marketing of the high-tier plans was fraudulent.
Kahn initially used Claude for personal tasks but later relied on it heavily for coding. After upgrading, he repeatedly hit usage walls and had to stop work, ration prompts, or buy extra credits to finish projects, according to the complaint. The lawsuit says the actual limits are difficult to predict and consistently lower than what was promised when the plans were marketed as giving five or twenty times the capacity of the standard Pro subscription.
"The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage," reads the lawsuit, that claims Kahn "found himself needing either to halt his work, ration his usage, or purchase additional usage to ensure that he could complete his work."
Anthropic has not commented on the suit, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company offers free access plus paid tiers, with the Pro plan running $17 to $20 a month. The higher Max plans were positioned for power users needing substantially more compute.
This lawsuit arrives amid mounting frustration with AI subscriptions and tokenomics. Power users and even large enterprises have complained for months about unpredictable rate limits, especially on coding workflows - with several documented cases of extreme overspending, including one unnamed Anthropic client (Amazon?) that racked up roughly $500 million in Claude charges in a single month after failing to cap employee usage.
Compute scarcity remains a core issue across the sector. A surge in demand earlier this year strained systems at Anthropic and rivals, producing outages and tighter limits even for paying customers. At the same time, companies are racing to launch new models ahead of expected IPOs while navigating new government restrictions. Days before this suit, the Trump administration banned foreign governments, companies, and individuals from accessing Anthropic's most powerful models after Amazon discovered a way to jailbreak the company's Fable AI into its unrestricted form - Mythos, forcing the company to shut off certain access to comply.
On Sunday, Anthropic execs scrambled to DC to triage the situation.
Fable 5 launched on June 9 as the first broadly available "Mythos-class" model, the public-facing version of a system Anthropic had previously kept behind a vetted-access wall because of its cyber and biological capabilities. Mythos 5, the same underlying model with some safeguards removed, stayed reserved for cleared cybersecurity partners. Fable 5 was the middle path: Mythos-grade capability, Anthropic said, with guardrails strong enough for general release. The company put it on the API, made it generally available on Amazon Bedrock and GitHub Copilot, and folded it into Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans at no extra charge through June 22.