Lawsuit Targets Anthropic: Claude Max's "5x, 20x Usage" Claim Allegedly Masked a Murky Weekly Limit

Pay twice as much, but only get 1.7 times the usage—that's the core claim behind a class action lawsuit a group of Claude users has filed. According to The Verge, a class action complaint filed on September 8 accuses Anthropic of failing to clearly disclose the actual usage limits when marketing its Max subscription plans.

When Anthropic launched Claude Max in April 2025, the official pitch was that paying $100/month would get you "5x more" usage than the Pro plan, while $200/month would get you "20x more." By comparison, Claude Pro starts at as low as $17/month with an annual plan. Anthropic positioned Max as "for users who rely on Claude throughout the day."

The problem lies in how the math works. The complaint states that Anthropic's advertised multipliers only applied to the per-session usage cap, which resets every five hours—but Max users are actually subject to a separate "weekly usage cap" as well, a rule that wasn't added until August 2025, months after Max launched. Once you factor in the weekly cap, the 20x plan—which should offer 4x more usage than the 5x plan—actually only delivers 1.7 times more, despite costing twice as much.

This isn't the first lawsuit of its kind. Back in June, a single Claude subscriber had already filed an individual federal lawsuit; this new filing is essentially an escalated, multi-plaintiff version of that action. Similar confusion has reportedly been circulating on Reddit for a while now, with one user writing in a discussion thread: "From the interface, I always assumed I was buying 20x weekly usage, because that's what I was paying for—weekly usage, not some multiplier buried in session limits. It wasn't until someone posted about it on Reddit that I realized that wasn't the case."

Monica Vaca, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, told The Verge that Anthropic does list the Max plan's limits on its Claude support page (last updated August 7, 2026)—but that users would need to click through several layers of hyperlinks just to find the actual calculation. As she put it: "This is really hard for consumers—they don't know what's inside the black box."

As of press time, Anthropic has not responded to Engadget's request for comment.