Anthropic Sued Over Claude Max’s Secret Prompts Limits

Anthropic is being sued in a class action lawsuit alleging that their Claude Max subscription plans provide significantly less usage than promised. Karl Kahn, from Washington DC, filed the lawsuit in federal court on June 15th, stating that ‘the actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage.’

The Max plans (priced at $100 and $200 per month) are marketed as providing 5x and 20x the usage compared to the cheaper Pro plan. According to Kahn, this wasn’t the case. After switching to Max 20x in April 2026, he found himself using 15% of his weekly limit during a 5 hour session, followed by reaching weekly limits shortly afterwards. He is seeking class action status for US users who have purchased Max plans since April 2025. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

1Why a rate-limit lawsuit matters

Here’s the core issue with AI subscriptions: Frontier models are expensive to run, but users pay fixed monthly fees with nice multipliers like ‘20x’. But how much is ‘20x’? It’s not always clear in tokens or messages, and two users on the same plan could get very different usage depending on their prompt weights. If you’ve ever been programming away only to find yourself rate limited for days, then you know how Kahn feels.

As someone who uses Claude Code a lot, I’ve seen firsthand how these limits and restrictions have changed over the last year. Unfortunately, ‘usage’ is measured in a way that you can’t directly observe when using the tool. Regardless of whether Kahn wins or loses, it highlights an important issue around ‘unlimited-ish’ subscriptions with hidden usage limits. Expect more transparency from other companies in terms of token budgets and realtime usage meters instead of vague multipliers.