GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
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Anthropic says power users are key to its business — it’s prioritized them even when it means cutting off other popular applications, like OpenClaw. But some of these same customers say Anthropic misled them into believing they’d get more out of a top-tier pricing subscription than they did.
In an expanded class action lawsuit filed today, a group of Claude subscribers say the company deceptively advertised the limits of its Max subscription tier. The lawsuit was brought by attorneys Monica Vaca and Kati Daffan, who both formerly worked at the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan. It’s a rare attempt to legally penalize AI companies for a widely held point of frustration: the industry’s growing money squeeze.
Anthropic’s Max plan for Claude is an upgrade to the $20/month Pro plan. It has two pricing options: $100 per month for “5x” the usage limits of Pro or $200 per month for “20x”. But the lawsuit alleges that these numbers, advertised in Anthropic’s marketing graphics, are misleadingly couched in fine print. Anthropic actually says you’ll get 20x or 5x the usage that the Pro plan offers, but it’s only promised for five-hour chunks of time that are subject to a weekly limit — which the complaint alleges adds up to a much smaller total increase in usage capacity.
To understand this, “you’ve got to dive deep,” Vaca said. It requires clicking two different hyperlinks to see the word “session,” and then to see what “session” meant, you’d need to separately go to the Pro plan webpage for an expanded definition.
Complaints about Max’s terms have cropped up online. One Reddit user wrote, “The weekly allowance is what the pricing page makes you think you’re buying. The rolling 5-hour window is what actually controls whether you can work … It’s like giving someone a bigger gas tank while keeping the fuel pump limited to one gallon every five hours.”
Vaca said in an interview that Claude users often will upgrade on the fly if they encounter limits while working on a project, then are often frustrated after they pay. “People see that they are going to get this dramatically expanded usage … What we hear from people, though, is that when they sign up, they are surprised that they’re not getting the usage that they thought they were getting.”
Over the past eight months or more, as pressures to turn a profit increase, AI customers have frequently complained that top labs are passing on their steep operating costs. Although Anthropic announced the Max plan in April 2025, it didn’t impose the allegedly deceptive weekly limits until a few months later in August, as the company pushed to compete with OpenAI. In Anthropic’s latest model release, Fable 5.1, the company hinted at broader cost concerns among customers, writing that it was “addressing the feedback we’ve received from customers on price” in the new model’s pricing.
The complaint was filed in July before being withdrawn and refiled as an expanded class action. In a motion to dismiss the earlier case, Anthropic argued that it didn’t necessarily omit the session limits from its marketing; rather, it says it’s technically available to the consumer if they know where to look. “Accessing this clarifying information … required nothing more than clicking hyperlinks available in the purchase process—the digital equivalent of flipping a product over to read the back label,” Anthropic wrote in the motion to dismiss.
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