A new class-action lawsuit accuses Anthropic of misleading advertising about Claude usage with its top-tier plan.
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A group of Claude users are suing Anthropic for what they allege to be misleading advertising of its top-tier Max subscription plan. As reported by The Verge, a class-action lawsuit filed on September 8 accuses Anthropic of failing to make clear the limitations of its Max plan for Claude, which it first launched back in April of 2025.
With Max, Anthropic says you get "5x or 20x more usage than the Pro plan," depending on whether you pay $100 or $200 per month. Claude Pro plans start at $17 per month if billed annually. The upgraded tier, Anthropic says, is "ideal for frequent users who work with Claude on a variety of tasks."
The crux of the suit — which follows the federal lawsuit brought by a single Claude subscriber back in June — is that Anthropic's marketing of Max refers only to the amount of usage users can expect versus the Pro plan within a daily session window, which resets every five hours. However, Max users are still subject to weekly usage limits, which were only introduced a few months later in August of last year.
Confusion around the actual Claude Max offering has been the subject of wider discussion on sites like Reddit, where a number of people have expressed their frustration about Anthropic's advertising. "From the UI I genuinely thought I was getting 20x weekly usage because weekly usage is what I'm paying for, not a multiplier to a session limiter within the service," one commenter wrote. "I didn't know otherwise until a reddit post told me."
A viral post posted as a screenshot at the top of this Reddit thread claims that you should reasonably expect four times more usage when purchasing a $200 20x Max plan over a 5x $100 plan, but when the weekly cap is factored in it only actually works out at 1.7x, despite being twice the price.
Anthropic does list the limitations of the Max plans in a Claude support page (most recently updated on August 7, 2026), but Monica Vaca, one of two attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, says that the terms aren't clear, and require people to click several hyperlinks to learn the true nature of the 5x or 20x usage claims. "This is hard for consumers — they don't know what's in the black box," she told The Verge.
Anthropic had not responded to Engadget's request for comment at the time of publication.
