The artificial intelligence company Anthropic is facing a newly proposed class action lawsuit alleging it's misleading subscribers about plan usage limits for Claude. Claude is an AI assistant designed for coding, writing, research and data analysis. 

The suit alleges that the actual rate limits imposed on subscribers to the two most expensive paid tiers, the Max 5x and Max 20x, are far below what the company advertises. Usage limits, according to Anthropic, refer to how much users can work with Claude during a specific window of time, like a "conversation budget." 

The complaint argues that the real usage cap for the 20x, which costs $200 per month and promises 20 times the usage cap of the Pro package, amounts to "just six to eight times the usage of Pro." The Max 5x plan, which costs $100 per month, purportedly delivers "just three-and-a-half times the usage of Pro" instead of the promised five times. The Claude Pro subscription tier costs between $17 and $20 per month. 

The plaintiff, Karl Khan, filed the suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Sunday. Khan first tinkered with Claude for personal reasons before deciding to use it for coding work, upgrading his subscription twice to the Max 20x plan by April 2026.

He said he quickly found he was frequently using up nearly 20% of his weekly data allocation in a single 5-hour-long coding sprint. Khan said he compared his experience across the different subscription tiers and concluded that there was a discrepancy between the advertising and the reality of Claude's usage rate limits.

Even as concerns proliferate about the rising costs of AI model subscriptions and the lack of transparency of AI usage limits for commercial customers, several of the Claude models continue to be adopted by programmers and so-called vibe coders.

The Trump administration recently banned foreign governments and companies from using Anthropic's most powerful AI tools and has temporarily shut down entire models until they comply with the new ruling.

Anthropic continues to race out tools to its users ahead of its initial public offering. Its competitors are doing the same -- SpaceX just executed the largest IPO in history, with OpenAI primed to hit the public market soon.

An Anthropic representative didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Claude's ambiguous usage limits 

It remains unclear what the usage limit for Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x plans actually is -- this is addressed in the filing, which argues that Anthropic's website "is a black box, without any meaningful description of how usage is calculated."

The company's blog posts offer its customers advice on how to manage usage for big projects and explain that every plan is still affected by both per-session and weekly usage limits, but there is no blog post explaining exactly how many prompts each plan allows a customer to send to Claude during the relevant windows of time. The lawsuit also alleges that Anthropic doesn't clearly define what constitutes a single session.

Customers who reach their rate limit on premium plans are prompted to spend more money 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] discretion."

The complaint states that "many subscribers have reported their frustration and complained that [Anthropic] has engaged in a bait and switch," including testimonies from frustrated customers. At least one popular Reddit thread is filled with similar stories, where multiple subscribed users were surprised by usage bottlenecks. The original poster described the premium plan as "extremely misleading."

The complaint seeks class action status for anyone who has purchased and used Anthropic's Max 5x or Max 20x subscription plans since April 2025. While we don't yet know the scope of the damages for which restitution is being sought in this case, the complaint states that the "amount in controversy exceeds the sum of $5 million exclusive of costs."