--- title: "Anthropic Sued for Allegedly Ripping Off Its Highest-Paying Customers" description: "A power user is accusing Anthropic of misleading customers of its $100 and $200 a month plans on its AI usage limits." date: "2026-06-18" modified: "2026-06-18" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-sued-ripping-off-customers" categories: - "Anthropic" - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Anthropic Sued for Allegedly Ripping Off Its Highest-Paying Customers ![A photo illustration featuring Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images* An angry customer is suing [Anthropic]() on behalf of all users of its priciest subscription tiers. In a federal lawsuit filed Monday, Karl Kahn accuses the Claude AI maker of misleading customers about the usage limits on its "Max 5x" and "Max 20x" plans and is seeking reimbursement, [*The Wall Street Journal* reports](), in a sign of the pushback Anthropic, and other AI labs, are receiving over the costs of their services, especially by power users. Anthropic has emerged as the go-to provider of AI coding tools. Its cheapest coding plan, Claude Pro, costs $17 to $20 a month. But for heavy coding tasks, Anthropic offers Max 5x, which costs $100 a month, and Max 20x, which is an even more substantial $200 a month. These offer much higher usage limits, but the lawsuit alleges customers aren't getting what it says on the tin — namely, that Max 5x should give you five times the Pro cap, and 20x twenty times. This is what the language on Anthropic's website [still promises](), but in reality it's "far below the advertised amount," the suit states, per the *WSJ*, claiming that the company's marketing is fraudulent. In Kahn's experience, he found that he was hitting the weekly usage limit on his Max 20x subscription within weeks of upgrading to it, hitting 15 percent of his weekly usage in just one five-hour session. He "found himself needing either to halt his work, ration his usage, or purchase additional usage to ensure that he could complete his work," the suit alleges. Coding is one of the most intensive tasks you can have an AI model do, and the culture around it prioritizes speed and volume. Vibe coders and software engineers will run multiple coding agents for hours at a time, [racking up monthly bills in the thousands of dollars](). AI companies have become stricter about how much coding customers can do with their plans, [transitioning to usage based billing]() that charges customers according to the number of tokens their tasks consume, which more closely aligns to the real-world computing costs that the AI provider incurs. But as the latest lawsuit argues, these companies aren't being transparent about how they're tracking and calculating customer usage. The lawsuit has [generated significant discussion in the r/ClaudeAI subreddit](), with some echoing Kahn's complaints — and others shouting it down because the 5x and 20x plans, in their eyes, provide incredible value. **More on AI:** [*Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()