A federal lawsuit filed Monday accuses Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI chatbot, of misleading customers about the usage allowances on its premium subscription plans, alleging that the actual computing power provided falls far short of what the company advertises. The suit, filed in the Northern District of California on behalf of Washington, D.C.-based customer Karl Kahn, is seeking class-action status and represents an early legal test of consumer protections in the rapidly growing premium AI subscription market.
Anthropic’s Claude AI offers a free service and several paid tiers, with the amount of computing power increasing with each plan’s cost. Its cheapest paid subscription, Claude Pro, costs $17 to $20 a month. The company’s Max 5x plan costs $100 a month, and its Max 20x plan costs $200 a month. The lawsuit alleges that while Anthropic markets the Max 5x and Max 20x plans as having five and 20 times the usage caps of the Pro plan, the actual limits are hard to determine and appear to be lower.
The claim is based largely on emails the suit says Anthropic sent to different tiers of subscribers in July 2025 explaining how much weekly usage each tier could expect of specific Anthropic AI models. “The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage,” the lawsuit states.
Kahn initially began using Claude for personal reasons but later started coding extensively with it, according to the court filing. He upgraded to a Max 20x subscription in April 2026. Within weeks, he found he was hitting weekly usage limits imposed by the company, the suit alleges, blowing through 15% of his weekly allowance in one five-hour sprint. 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. It also seeks a finding that Anthropic’s marketing of the plans is fraudulent.
The experience of Anthropic power users has emerged as a bellwether for the broader AI boom, according to the complaint. Entire industries are navigating how much to spend on AI tools and how to re-engineer thousands of jobs — putting intense scrutiny on the reliability of models from Anthropic as well as those from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. At the same time, computing firepower for AI systems has been in short supply. A surge in usage when Anthropic’s models went viral earlier this year strained the company’s systems, leading to some user complaints about outages and service limits. Anthropic and its competitors are racing to roll out new tools ahead of highly anticipated initial public offerings.
Monday’s suit comes days after the Trump administration banned foreign governments, companies, and individuals from using Anthropic’s most powerful AI tools, prompting the company to shut off access to certain models for everyone to comply with the new rule. As MSI reported earlier this month, the U.S. ordered the ban and Anthropic halted cross-border access to models impacted by the restriction.