Daniel Mercer
A coalition of users from Claude has initiated legal action against Anthropic, alleging deceptive marketing practices regarding its premium Max subscription plan. As detailed by The Verge, a class-action lawsuit filed on September 8 accuses Anthropic of obscuring the limitations associated with its Max plan, which was originally introduced in April 2025.
According to Anthropic, subscribers to the Max plan can expect “5x or 20x more usage than the Pro plan,” based on whether they choose to pay $100 or $200 monthly. In contrast, Claude’s Pro plans are available starting at $17 per month when billed annually. Anthropic promotes this enhanced tier as “ideal for frequent users who engage with Claude across various tasks.”
The main issue at the heart of the lawsuit—following a previous federal case filed by an individual Claude subscriber in June—centers on Anthropic’s marketing of the Max plan. This marketing emphasizes the usage users might anticipate compared to the Pro plan within a daily session, which resets every five hours. Max subscribers remain subject to weekly usage limits, introduced only months later in August of the previous year.
The confusion surrounding the actual offerings of Claude Max has sparked broader discussions on platforms like Reddit, where many users have voiced their dissatisfaction with Anthropic’s advertising. One commenter expressed, “From the UI, I genuinely assumed I was receiving 20x weekly usage because that’s what I’m paying for, not just a multiplier for a session limit within the service. I only learned otherwise from a Reddit post.”
A widely shared screenshot in this Reddit thread suggests that one should expect four times the usage when opting for the $200 20x Max plan versus the 5x $100 plan. after accounting for the weekly cap, the actual benefit is merely 1.7x, despite the higher cost.
Anthropic does provide details about the limitations of the Max plans on a support page for Claude, last updated on August 7, 2026. Nevertheless, Monica Vaca, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit, argues that the terms are not sufficiently clear. Users must click through multiple hyperlinks to fully understand the implications of the 5x or 20x usage claims. “This creates challenges for consumers—they are unaware of what remains hidden,” she remarked to The Verge.
At the time of publication, Anthropic had not issued a response to Engadget’s request for comment.
