Anthropic has been hit with a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that subscribers paying up to $200 per month for premium Claude plans have received significantly less usage than the company’s marketing materials suggested.
Summary
- Anthropic faces a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging its Claude Max subscription plans provide less usage than advertised.
- Plaintiff Karl Kahn claims premium subscribers encounter restrictive usage caps that disrupt coding and development work.
- The lawsuit arrives shortly after Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 shutdowns, adding to scrutiny surrounding the AI company.
According to a complaint filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Washington, D.C. resident Karl Kahn is seeking class-action status on behalf of customers who have paid for Anthropic’s higher-tier Claude subscriptions since April 2024.
The filing argues that the company’s Max 5x and Max 20x plans do not provide the level of access many users would reasonably expect from their advertised terms.
At the center of the dispute are Anthropic’s premium subscription tiers, which cost $100 and $200 per month. According to the lawsuit, the company promotes those plans as offering five times and 20 times the usage available under its standard Pro subscription.
The complaint alleges that the actual limits imposed on subscribers fall well below those advertised multipliers and are difficult for customers to predict before reaching usage caps.
Kahn claims he upgraded to the Max 20x plan after increasing his use of Claude for software development and coding tasks. According to the filing, a single five-hour work session consumed roughly 15% of his weekly allowance.
The lawsuit argues that such restrictions forced subscribers to either stop working, ration their usage, or purchase additional access to complete projects.
The complaint focuses on premium subscription limits
Supporting its claims, the lawsuit references emails Anthropic allegedly sent to subscribers in July 2025. According to the complaint, those communications outlined expected weekly usage allowances across different Claude models and subscription tiers.
The plaintiff argues that those disclosures demonstrate a gap between how the plans were marketed and the access ultimately provided.
As a result, the filing asks the court to determine that Anthropic’s marketing practices were misleading or fraudulent and seeks relief for affected subscribers. The case arrives as the company continues to attract investor attention ahead of a widely anticipated public offering.
Legal scrutiny is not limited to Anthropic. Recently, OpenAI faced a multistate investigation related to alleged consumer harm connected to ChatGPT. The probe gained attention because it emerged shortly after reports that OpenAI had confidentially filed paperwork related to a potential IPO.
Anthropic faces pressure from multiple fronts
The lawsuit adds another challenge for Anthropic only days after the company drew attention for a separate controversy involving access to its advanced AI models.
As previously reported by crypto.news, Anthropic suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after complying with a U.S. government directive tied to export controls.
According to Anthropic, the order required restrictions on foreign nationals, including foreign-national employees located both inside and outside the United States. To comply, the company disabled access to both models while keeping other Claude models available.
Commenting on that decision, CoinFund founder Jake Brukhman argued recently that advanced AI models have become key points of centralized control.
According to Brukhman, decentralized AI networks are attracting interest because access to large-scale computing resources can be distributed rather than concentrated within a small number of companies.
Brukhman cited projects including Gensyn, Prime Intellect, Bagel, Pluralis, Nous Research, Macrocosmos AI, and Covenant as examples of teams working on distributed AI training systems. According to his post, those efforts suggest decentralized training can compete with centralized approaches, although technical challenges remain.
Meanwhile, the newly filed lawsuit places Anthropic’s subscription business under a different form of scrutiny as the company navigates both regulatory and consumer-facing disputes.
