Anthropic sued over Claude Max usage limits

Karl Kahn, a resident of Washington, D.C., filed a federal lawsuit on Monday accusing Anthropic of overselling how much he could use Claude. The lawsuit claims that the actual usage caps of Anthropic's Max 5x and Max 20x tiers are difficult to determine and appear lower than the limits advertised on the company's website. Anthropic offers three paid tiers for individuals. Its most affordable plan, Claude Pro, starts at $17 per month and "offers at least five times the usage per session compared to our free service" during peak hours, though the number of messages varies based on message length, file attachments, conversation length, and the model or feature used. Since April 2025, the company has also offered Max 5x and 20x plans, which promise up to five and 20 times higher usage caps than the Pro package, priced at $100 and $200 per month respectively. The lawsuit alleges that "the actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage." After upgrading to the Max 20x plan in April 2025, Kahn quickly hit his weekly usage limits; a single five-hour session consumed 15% of his weekly allowance. The lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of other U.S. consumers who purchased a Max subscription since its introduction. Anthropic declined to comment. Rate limits are a frequent topic on Reddit, with one user recently complaining about blowing past their five-hour limit after a single Claude Code prompt. Last July, the company imposed weekly rate limits on Claude Code usage in response to users running the coding agent continuously. All large language models operate on tokens—input and output costs vary greatly depending on prompt complexity. The lawsuit highlights a growing disconnect between consumer expectations and the actual cost of providing AI inference. Traditional software subscription models do not map neatly to the compute required for LLMs, and the problem may become more acute when Anthropic and OpenAI go public.