A proposed class action filed Monday in San Francisco hit Anthropic over its Claude Max subscription tiers, accusing the AI company of hiding usage caps that kick in even after users pay $100 or $200 a month for advertised speed boosts. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by plaintiff Karl Kahn, claims the company throttles heavy work despite marketing promises of 5x and 20x usage enhancements.
The subscription tiers in question
Anthropic launched the Max 5x and Max 20x tiers in April 2025. The names refer to advertised boosts — up to five times or twenty times the rate of standard Claude access — and they cost $100 and $200 per month, respectively. Kahn, a software developer who upgraded to the $200 Max 20x tier for coding work, says he hit the hidden limits almost immediately. In one five-hour session, Kahn claims, he burned through 15% of his weekly quota, leaving him unable to use the service at the advertised speed for the rest of the week.
How the caps work
Anthropic added weekly usage caps in late August 2025, after power users ran Claude Code — its AI-assisted coding tool — nearly nonstop. The company said at the time that the change would affect fewer than 5% of subscribers. The caps reset on two different schedules: a rolling window every five hours and a separate weekly limit. Kahn argues neither cap was made clear enough for users to track their remaining allowance. The suit seeks class status for everyone who subscribed to either Max tier since launch, plus refunds and damages under consumer protection law.
The scale of usage
One enterprise client ran up a $500 million bill in a single month, according to the facts underlying the lawsuit. That figure illustrates how quickly intensive AI use can scale — and why Anthropic may have felt pressure to cap individual heavy users. But for subscribers like Kahn, the cap felt like a bait-and-switch. The lawsuit argues that Anthropic's marketing of the tiers created a reasonable expectation of unlimited high-speed access, which the fine-print caps then undermined.
What's at stake
Most consumer class actions of this type tend to settle with small payouts and clearer disclaimers rather than a removal of the capped model. But this case lands at an awkward moment for Anthropic. The company is reportedly eyeing a public listing and is already involved in other disputes, including a controversy over AI ownership tied to the Trump administration. Anthropic declined to comment on the lawsuit. A hearing date has not yet been set. The court will first need to decide whether to certify the class — a step that would let thousands of Max subscribers join the case.
