A new class action lawsuit questions whether Anthropic broke the law by misleading power users

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 re-filed 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.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

Vaca disagrees that it’s that easy to understand the terms. “This is hard for consumers — they don’t know what’s in that black box,” she said. “They have to rely on the claims the marketer is giving. There’s no way for them to audit it. There’s no way for them to know exactly what it is they’re going to get… They’re basically taking a leap, and they’re believing in an honest marketplace.”

She added that another reason the case was “compelling” for her is that she and Daffan started hearing from people who felt they needed to pay high-priced subscription costs for AI services in order to avoid becoming irrelevant in the job market. But oftentimes, she said, they felt they weren’t getting what they paid for, which was frustrating for a service that costs between $100 and $200 per month.

“[Daffan] and I worked at the Federal Trade Commission for 38 years combined,” Vaca said, adding, “There is a long line of precedent on false advertising. It’s commercial speech. You can’t lie when you’re marketing a product.”

Even if Anthropic has the stipulations somewhere on its website, Vaca said, it shouldn’t be up to the consumer to have to seek that out.

“It’s a ‘buyer beware’ approach,” she said. “And that’s really not fair to people.”