The lawsuit alleges that allowances for Claude on the AI firm’s paid tiers are misleading.
Anthropic is facing a lawsuit over allegedly misleading paid subscribers on usage limits for its AI chatbot, Claude.
The class action suit claims the actual rate limits for paid subscribers are much lower than advertised. The Claude Max 5x plan, which costs users $100 per month, reportedly delivers “just three-and-a-half times the usage of Pro,” instead of the advertised five times.
The Claude Max 20x plan gives users “just six to eight times the usage of Pro,” instead of the agreed 20 times, with the plan costing $200 per month.
The basemark Claude Pro subscription cost between $17 and $20 per month.
The federal lawsuit, filed on behalf of Karl Kahn with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, is one of the first examples of customer pushback against the alleged lack of transparency within AI models and the subscription tiers.
Anthropic’s usage limits for Claude are ambiguous, and there is no publicly available data from the company that explains exactly how many prompts or responses a customer can use with each plan or in any one session. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic does not clearly define what constitutes a single session – making it more difficult for users to stay within their limits.
If the user reaches their plan limit, they are prompted to pay for more tokens to continue developing their projects. The complaint stated “many subscribers have reported their frustration and complained that [Anthropic] has engaged in a bait and switch.”
Anthropic confirmed in a blog post that it reserves the right to “limit your usage in other ways, such as weekly and monthly caps or model and feature usage, at [its] discretion”.
Claude is a tool among coders and developers, but many have taken to Reddit to complain about hitting usage limits “way faster than expected” and finding themselves having to halt their sessions or ration usage.
The AI giant announced on Reddit it was investigating the issue, but consumers allege this is still happening, and not just in Claude Code, but also in Claude.
AI tools have become a crutch for a number of industries, which have replaced human workers with chatbots. But many are now realising that usage limits and energy prices are forcing even a Nvidia executive to admit that AI can be more expensive than human workers in some instances.
