Consumer attorneys are watching AI subscription pricing closely, and this case represents one of the first times that frustration over usage limits has made it to court
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Anthropic faces a new federal lawsuit alleging it misled subscribers about usage limits on its premium Claude AI subscription plans, according to The Wall Street Journal, with a customer seeking class-action status on behalf of others who purchased the plans since April 2024.
Filed Monday in the Northern District of California on behalf of Washington, D.C.-based plaintiff Karl Kahn, the complaint takes aim at two of Anthropic's premium tiers: the Max 5x at $100 per month and the Max 20x at twice that price. Subscribers pay for the promise of five or 20 times the computing access available on the base Pro plan, which runs $17 to $20 monthly. But the complaint contends the real limits fall short of that and are nearly impossible for users to pin down.
"The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage," the lawsuit states, according to The Journal. It also seeks a finding that Anthropic's marketing of the plans is fraudulent.
After starting out on Claude for casual personal use, Kahn eventually pivoted to heavy coding work and moved up to the Max 20x tier this past April. A single five-hour work session consumed 15% of his weekly allotment, and the caps started cutting him off not long after he subscribed, according to the complaint. He "found himself needing either to halt his work, ration his usage, or purchase additional usage to ensure that he could complete his work," the lawsuit said. Central to the complaint are emails that Anthropic allegedly sent out in July 2025 detailing per-model weekly usage expectations for subscribers at each pricing tier.
Anthropic declined the Journal's request for comment.
Consumer attorneys are watching AI subscription pricing closely, and this case represents one of the first times that frustration over opaque usage limits has made it to court — a sign that AI charges are now embedded enough in household spending to invite the same scrutiny once reserved for streaming bills. Earlier this year, a viral spike in interest in Anthropic's models overwhelmed its infrastructure, and users took to forums to complain about interruptions and throttled access.
The broader question of what AI subscriptions actually deliver is one companies across industries are grappling with. Anthropic's enterprise plans include granular spend caps at the organization and individual user level, with usage analytics — making Monday's allegations about transparency in its consumer plans a notable contrast.
Pressure to deliver features is intensifying across the industry, with Anthropic and rival AI developers all eyeing closely watched initial public offerings. The filing also coincides with a recent Trump administration directive prohibiting foreign governments, firms, and individuals from accessing Anthropic's top-tier models — a rule that led the company to pull those models from availability broadly.
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