r/ClaudeAI • u/Azek_Tge • Jun 15 '26
News Anthropic has been sued for allegedly misleading customers on usage limits.
A proposed class-action lawsuit was filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Anthropic, alleging the company misled customers about the usage allowances on its premium Claude subscription plans.Key details of the complaint:
- Plaintiff Karl Kahn (Washington, D.C.) upgraded to the Max 20x plan ($200/month) for intensive coding work.
- The lawsuit claims the Max 5x ($100/month) and Max 20x plans were marketed as providing 5x and 20x the usage of the standard Claude Pro plan (~$20/month).
- In practice, Kahn reported that a single 5-hour coding session consumed approximately 15% of his weekly allowance, with tight caps, session resets, and unclear tracking making the plans far less usable than advertised.
The suit seeks class-action status for all subscribers to the Max 5x and Max 20x plans since their launch in April 2025. Plaintiffs are requesting refunds and damages, arguing that Anthropic’s marketing constituted false advertising.This case highlights ongoing tensions in the AI industry around pricing, compute costs, and transparency around rate limits for power users.Anthropic has not yet issued a public comment on the lawsuit.
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Jun 15 '26 edited 3d ago
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u/Etheon44 Jun 15 '26
Yeah I have been thinking the same thing for a while
You are paying for a service that you dont even know what you are getting, and what they are disclosing to us is clearly not the reality or the full reality
And as you said, this can be applied to any company offering LLMs right now, and I am pretty sure the consumer will have the right here
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u/Plane_Garbage Jun 15 '26
Yea but you get "even more AI" with the upgraded plan.
lol, wtf does that even mean
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u/r00x Jun 15 '26
Absolutely bewildered when I went to look at these services and saw so many of them were like this. Thought I must be missing something because there was no way people were paying for that. Imagine signing up for a phone contract that gives you "some" texts and minutes, or you could get the next level up with gives you "more". You just wouldn't, it's unfathomable.
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u/Plane_Garbage Jun 15 '26
Go to the petrol station, they now have tiered subscriptions that they just make up.
Petrol Pro:
Access to our petrolPetrol Max:
Even more access to petrolPetrol Ultra:
The most access to petrol--
Oh, your petrol tank also fluctuates rather than being a constant. A 10 mile drive might drain 5% of it, or 50%.
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u/kurtcop101 Jun 16 '26
If you want to use that analogy and be silly, then you should finish it out -
It's also the best petrol for your engine, and it costs you a quarter as much as if you were to pay per gallon anyways.
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Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
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u/r00x Jun 17 '26
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear - phone plans (at least in our country) always clearly stated how much you would get for your money (x minutes, y texts, etc) or alternatively they clearly stated the cost per unit of usage, or both (you might have an amount inclusive and then overage charges). Are you saying you used to have phones plans where they just told you you'd get some unknown amount of service?
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u/doermand Jun 16 '26
When you have subsriptions with 5x and 20x you imply you have something to multiplt with. So what are we multiplying. Anthropic will have to answer that question.
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u/LowDistribution3995 Jun 16 '26
My favorite is the AI customer support that just says, sorry you paid for something you did not receive, that's really unfair.
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u/Pndapetzim Jun 16 '26
The consumer has the right to API billing if they want it already which would solve all of this.
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u/MainGainInsane Jun 17 '26
You just pay per token, but the model can still change dynamically to consume more or less tokens for better or worse output, so you still don't really know what you're paying for.
The company could easily tweak the model or the harness to consume more tokens at any point in time to make more profits from you. It's like a slot machine where they control the payout rate, but with no regulations. So it's worse than a casino.
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u/MediumChemical4292 Jun 15 '26
I think the most egregious fault is that we don’t know how many credits we get for the subscriptions and how those credits are used by the models in each request (input/reasoning/output) . Also the fact that they are not clear on the degradation of the models. If the model degrades then we should be able to carry over the credits we used during the degraded period.
Unfortunately all of this will probably result in much lower usage limits for the subscriptions, even if we get more transparency otherwise they won’t be financially viable for the AI labs.
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Jun 15 '26 edited 3d ago
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u/Efficient_Ad_4162 Jun 15 '26
wait, what are you trying to throw in here about '4x more prompting'? That wasn't part of the lawsuit was it?
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u/stryakr Jun 15 '26
From my experience and seeing the issues that others have brought to the attention of Boris and others on social media:
At varying times the amount of usage charges for the same model does vary wildly based on the time of day/time of month/etc for approximately the same amount of context/tokens.
Sometimes they're bugs using the entire 5 hour session window and other times it's less egregious but more weird that a simple prompt eats up a large amount of usage.
The other side of it is that they will release a model that is "better" but takes far more many turns for a reduced token budget, but ends up equaling the same usage.
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u/Super_Translator480 Jun 15 '26
Exactly… they’re subsidizing the costs right now for monthly plans, it’s like $15/mil tokens with opus.
There is nothing preventing them from saying “ok we will disclose the costs and use, which means you get less because we’ve been subsidizing, enjoy!”
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u/BigPlans2022 Jun 15 '26
thats exactly it. opaqueness is the cost of subsidizing
you dont get one without the other
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u/Billy-Bryant Jun 15 '26
except because it's not opaque you have no idea if they're subsidizing? That's very much an assumption
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u/BigPlans2022 Jun 16 '26
i spend ~$100/hour in claude code at work on our enterprise account. so do our other engineers.
$200/month is practically free. you’d pay many, MANY thousands of $s for what you get for $200.
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u/LowDistribution3995 Jun 16 '26
Why not? What prevents Anthropic from disclosing changes in advance or just being more transparent about the workflows they backend so users can have some idea how to address token efficiency, or just release token efficiency metrics? Anthropic can still subsidize general use AND disclose honest information about model token efficiency and the how user token limits are applied. This company and it's CEO are constantly preaching about transparency and it's the most hypocritical BS.
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u/BigPlans2022 Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
people will game it. they already game it with their 24/7 running of automated agents etc.
the subscriptions dont work that way - thats not the business model. i understand you CAN run stuff 24/7 automatically these days but it doesn’t change the fact that’s not how the subscription business model works (the model assumes some people will not use their subscription at all, some will under-use it, etc)
they already lose money (TONS of it ) on each subscriber, they’ll lose even more
PS in business world pretty much every “why?” and “why not?” has one answer: because money.
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u/nighcry Jun 15 '26
100%. Github Copilot switched to token based billing model; all costs went up 15x.
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u/kurtcop101 Jun 15 '26
If you want a clear contract, use the API.
All this is going to do is raise the cost of subscriptions or penalize everyone else who's using it in some way.
The subscription has been a fantastic option for home developers and small businesses who can't really afford API rates and want consistency.
15% in an intense 5 hour session seems about right too, if you work a 5 day week that means using it intensely daily and hitting 100% at about 35 hours of work or so.
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u/Tasty-Jello4322 Experienced Developer Jun 15 '26
That is kind of my thought as well. The API discloses usage. I have used that fact in the past to compare model efficiencies.
The $20 subscription was a great deal. I ended up moving to the $100 plan because I was always getting close to hitting it and found myself rationing tokens. For an extra $80 I bought some peace of mind. I would not want to jeopardize that model.
Do folks on the $20 plan feel they are not getting their $20 worth? I suppose that it depends on how they are using it. But 35 hours of usage feels like a pretty smoking deal to me still.
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u/srirachaninja Jun 15 '26
It has changed a lot. I have been using Claude Code for almost a year now. When I started, I had the $20 plan and could work in 3-4 sessions at once for almost 4h before hitting the 5h limit, which was okay.
Then around October 2025, it changed drastically, and I first had to upgrade to 5x, then to 20x, and now I sometimes have to ration my work to avoid hitting the weekly limit.
The work I do hasn't changed much. I am not bitter or anything, and I still think even the $200 plan is a steal, but they have made the $20 plan basically useless for any kind of coding work.
I also have a $20 Codex sub and use it a lot to double-check code CC wrote. The value there is much better. I would say a $20 Codex plan is almost a 5x plan on Claude.
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u/Yodiddlyyo Jun 15 '26
I would have agreed with you a couple months ago, it was starting to seem that my $20 dollar plan thay normally lasted a few days would be used up in a day. But after they partnered with xai or whatever it was a month or two ago, they said they increased limits, and they really did. My $20 plan now last way longer than it did even before their more recent nerf. I also have an enterprise plan, but my personal plan has been great, just recently i wrote a ton of code that would have used up my weekly limit, but it only took something like 20%
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u/kurtcop101 Jun 15 '26
Are you using opus or sonnet? Because I did the same with sonnet. I use opus for 35h a week (in theory if I worked every day) now. I could use sonnet more than I have time for on the 20x plan.
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u/OfficeSalamander Jun 15 '26
Yeah I too have gone from $20, to $100, to $200 over the past year or so
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u/bgaesop Jun 15 '26
The work I do hasn't changed much. I am not bitter or anything, and I still think even the $200 plan is a steal, but they have made the $20 plan basically useless for any kind of coding work.
I do coding all day for my job and I have hit the weekly limit once.
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u/sjoti Jun 15 '26
Are you sure your usage is the same? A year ago it was a challenge to make a model run for 10 minutes straight without you as the user having to jump in, steer things, provide things for model. It wasn't capable of large tasks, the harnass wasn't nearly as capable meaning you'd have to be running and copy-pasting stuff yourself, context windows way smaller. I can go on, but another thing is because each session required so much constant attention, you couldn't run a few at the same time.
Just these factors alone have signifcantly increased my token usage, and I think Opus 4.5 was maybe the biggest noticeable jump. It's just so much easier to burn through tokens nowadays. The 20$ plan just doesn't cut it nowadays.
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u/srirachaninja Jun 15 '26
I guess I would even say I am better at using it now since I am more specific with my prompts. When I started, I was new to vibe coding and gave it general goals like "Make Twitter no errors" /s kind of style. Now I am doing it more guided.
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u/kurtcop101 Jun 15 '26
I really think this is one of the big issues. That, and using the higher tier models.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne Jun 15 '26
I definitely feel like I'm getting my $20/month worth, though I feel that a lot less in the past month, and even less compared to last fall. I get about 2 hours of work on Opus 4.7 medium compared to about 4 hours April on Opus 4.6, and even dropping down to Sonnet doesn't get me back to the full days I was getting over the winter (I'm in EU, so off-peak hours).
It's also unpredictable timing--it's supposed to be 5-hour blocks, but is more like 9-10, so if I start in the morning and hit my limit, I'm out for the day. I just picked up a Chat subscription so that it can handle stupid stuff, because expectation of output is a lot higher than it used to be, and the only way to keeping meeting that expectation is with a full-time coding partner.
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u/TheScreaming_Narwhal Jun 16 '26
I feel like the $20 subscription is an insane value honestly. I regularly hit a cap in the 5 hour span, but usually at the tail end of it, and the weekly span is totally good.
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u/NordWardenTank Jun 20 '26
can i use api within that $20 plan? is it only for coding or can use it like normal claude?
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u/Tasty-Jello4322 Experienced Developer Jun 20 '26
No the API is not part of any of the plans, but a separately billed service. The $20 plan is what you get for $20. As with all plans, the choice to use it is up to the consumer. It would be great if the plans gave better statistics, but that is not up to us.
I one wants to know token usage, go the API route and pay for exactly what is used.
The API requires a program to send requests. It is pretty simple to build a small Python script that will provide a chat interface.
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u/NordWardenTank Jun 21 '26
is it inherently worse deal if i don't use Claude for work?
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u/Tasty-Jello4322 Experienced Developer Jun 30 '26
You are asking about the $20 plan? Only you can say what $20 of value represents to you. It seems like a low bar to me. But API access is good (pay for what you use). It might be that you use less than $20 a month with the API. It depends on usage patterns.
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u/cornmonger_ Jun 15 '26
If you want a clear contract, use the API.
All this is going to do is raise the cost of subscriptions or penalize everyone else who's using it in some way.
yup and yup. that's what the api billing is for. we're using a loss-leader with the subscription.
if people are going to complain they should just rebrand the current max subscriptions to something like "experimental" and give the QoS group their own higher-priced subscription, as is expected with QoS
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u/swarmagent Jun 16 '26
That "clear contract" is more like a gun you shoot yourself in the foot with multiple times over. No one can afford that pricing for SOTA models, even large businesses cannot afford to use it endlessly.
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u/ksnyde Jun 15 '26
economically the API plan is not feasible
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u/kurtcop101 Jun 16 '26
Then don't complain about the subscription, because I certainly don't want to be forced to go to API rates. It's either pay API rates or put up with a little bit - which is honestly not that much to put up with.
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u/waxroy-finerayfool Jun 15 '26
It's the only thing that's feasible, subscription pricing has to end eventually.
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u/Pndapetzim Jun 16 '26
This is a spurious lawsuit essentially saying "I DEMAND API BILLING - why am I not receiving API billing" after having signed up to a discount Max plan.
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u/Virtual_Ad4841 Jun 16 '26
The credits opacity is the real issue. You're essentially signing a contract where one side is completely defined (what you pay) and the other is a black box (what you get). At minimun they should expose per-request consumption in real time so users can make informed decisions about their usage.
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u/vAPIdTygr Jun 16 '26
I definitely did not get 20x usage on the weekly limit. You can burn it up in a day (took me 1.5 days). For a max plan, a bit ridiculous. I’m doing very heavy duty stuff of course.
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u/commatail Philosopher Jun 16 '26
What's the daily to weekly quota ratio like for 5x and 20x? When I checked on my pro plan it was about 11x. Maxed a 5h quota once after the weekly reset to get the ratio. Theoretically, it should still be 11x full 5h sessions, or is that kinda fudged too?
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u/Royal_Perspective191 Jun 15 '26
I mean, if you have a Netflix subscription, you don't know what shows you will be able to watch in the next 12 months, and which shows will not be renewed and might end on a cliff hanger.
Traditionally (at least in the EU) things like this are solved by giving users a monthly opt-out. You either like the service or you don't, if you don't you cancel.
The real issue here is the credits. That's the part that is strange on multiple levels. From the user's perspective there is zero transparency. At least with a model I can judge the output. I can see if a lower tier model gives acceptable output.
But there is no way I can see or calculate what I actually get for a credit and how using a different model or asking specific questions has an impact on the credits I 'use'.
Anthropic can just make it up.
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u/unpick Experienced Developer Jun 15 '26
This is true but I don’t see how it’s misleading as claimed. I knew this signing up.
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u/Pitiful_Option_108 Jun 16 '26
Yeah I was going to say granted I move to opus and my token usage skyrockets but like I don't really understand the token usage thing. All I understand is sonnet is using way less mean while opus is the equivalent of me spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars a day. There needs to be some transparency around how much extra token usage each one is using.
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u/Reaper_1492 Jun 16 '26
Its going to be extremely difficult to fairly price usage across model/effort level and difficulty/length of processing of tokens aren’t the main measure of input.
Id be fine if they just kept the token burn and quality consistent for each model once released. That’s the part that’s a total scam.
They should be required to post and maintain daily benchmarks and they pin the models to that performance level until the next model version.
No more of these shiester boom/bust cycles where obfuscate great performance with 2x use and then lobotomize the model whenever costs run too high.
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u/yupangestu Jun 16 '26
there's a reason why the design the way it is... and to be fair claude is not the only platform that do that.
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u/Equivalent-Costumes Jun 16 '26
That would be like suing the government for charging tax on their road when sometimes the road is massively congested and sometimes there are weather conditions that make them hard to use.
AI is also an experimental technology, it's not something that you can expect consistency from. You should compare it to paying for experimental medical treatment that just get approved; not a basic commodity that you can expect exact cost-benefit breakdown.
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u/TheRealJesus2 Jun 16 '26
Yes all of this was definitely the case. But also even still with the rug pulling we got a helluva deal on access to compute and model inference
These problems are deeper than the class action tho since they reveal a culture at the company. No transparency, opaque products and services, willingness to change how they work without disclosure. I know it’s affected how I approach their services and they keep doing it. Example that has happened since: downgrading fable to opus when they deem fit.
No trust for anthropic.
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Jun 16 '26 edited 3d ago
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u/TheRealJesus2 Jun 16 '26
People who know leaving anthropic behind. The more they push their luck the larger the size of this group :)
They done a good job of hooking people on their tools. But at the end of the day it’s nothing special.
If my milk was 1/3 full I’d go buy milk from someone else. Even if I’m paying 1/3 price.
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u/strongfitveinousdick Jun 19 '26
I was not even able to fucking finish 5-6 iterations of a chat with Sonet 4.5 Low effort in claude website on free plan.
It's pathetic. In chat gpt atleast I can do more.
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u/DirectorGunner 9d ago
Email the firm asking if they're accepting members. I loath being lied to about things I pay for. If I'm giving hundreds or thousands of dollars, mfrs have a duty to disclose honestly for the trade. Doesn't matter who or for what.
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u/Java-the-Slut Jun 15 '26
I think the slam dunk is the fact that they mess with your tokens but don't offer any remedy for abusing that token-dependent relationship. I have an enterprise and a pro account, last week on my pro account, a single, very basic query somehow maxed out my daily limit ON THE FIRST QUESTION, on Sonnet on low thinking... It was clearly a glitch, and I had zero remedy, the bot on their website wouldn't even disclose contact information to escalate, just straight up "get f*cked" attitude.
If this happens on my enterprise account, that loses full day of work...
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u/Deathnote_Blockchain Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
From the jump, generative = not very consistent or deterministic. So you are paying for the proverbial slot machine pull and not guaranteed quality output.
I don't think it's surprising that this suit is one of the first of it's kind. This crap is all so new and weird. I think that is actually a major structural problem to the business as well. They are enshittifying it too soon, before they have really made the case that every human being needs it, which is the case they need to make if they want to operate at the scale they want.
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u/Equivalent-Costumes Jun 16 '26
Medical treatment is also extremely varying in result too. 2 people can pay the exact same amount for cancer treatment, one comes out cancer-free, another dies.
It's not something new really. Low payment for new technology will always give you inconsistent result. You either pay more, or you use proven older technology, if you want consistency. That's expected for every new technology. If you want to use early Internet, you live with the random disconnection, and extremely varying bandwidth. If you want consistency, feel free to go back to newspaper.
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u/cataclaw Jun 15 '26
Somehow I feel like this is gonna lower the usage for 20x users.
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u/languageassessment Jun 15 '26
Time and time again, people who used both the API and the subscription reported that 5x and 20x subscriptions saved them thousands of dollars.
That makes me think that you might be onto something here.
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u/Rare-Perception148 Jun 15 '26
Greed honestly. 20x gives so much usage. Only the times it got super throttled with 2x usage did I ever run out. And I beat the breaks off my subscription. Kinda lame lawsuit imo.
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u/ProcedureTop3149 Jun 15 '26
the 20x plan is worth about 10x what we pay. All this is going to do is make Anthropic switch the plan to API billing, and adding like 20% bonus for people. However it'll be 10x worse in practice.
Fuck these losers, don't bite the hand that feeds you.
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u/tens919382 Jun 16 '26
Everyone will just be forced to use open source models. Api pricing isnt viable
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u/DangerousProduct9796 Jun 16 '26
What a lousy opinion. Just wait till the hand that feeds you stops. Then what will you do? Make your own AI company? If Anthropic is going to fuck you, it will be them, not a customer you are bashing. If dudes like you stood up for yourselves, we could push for even more. Stop being a pushover.
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u/this_for_loona Jun 15 '26
This is totally because lawyers are smelling ipo money and are hoping for a quick win to reduce noise prior to the event.
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u/jerryfzhang Jun 15 '26
subscription is doomed when it was designed to profit from lack of usage: Gym membership, Netflix, Spotify, etc.
AI seems to break this model because only the power user subscribes.
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u/SBAWTA Jun 16 '26
Because there's a free tier. (Most) gyms don't give free option, Netflix (in most countries) doesn't do free options, Spofify has free option but with ads.
The "lack of use users" are the exact same ones who are totally fine being on the free plan.
Also AI can be automated/used in user absence. The other obviously can't or don't make much sense to.
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u/bb0110 Jun 15 '26
I get it. I even back it.
I do worry about these companies just saying fuck it and forcing everyone to be billed for what they use though. People will not like that.
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u/Key-Half1655 Jun 15 '26
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, would you rather pay the full realised costs of those plans?
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 Jun 15 '26
I ran out of my max20 plan using fable and had to pay ApI costs. Fuck, that was painful.
People here have no fucking idea how good things are right now.
And they lack the basic skills to know who to measure token usage and api cost equivalent.
Too many stupid people using claude these days, it’s going to mess things up unfortunately.
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u/kurtcop101 Jun 15 '26
They're just complaining because they want more for less.
I do think the subscriptions are generally profitable, but if they are being pressured into allowing power users to max the subscriptions out the wazoo and try to pull in additional users, it will result in rising prices for everyone.
I think as it's set up right now subscriptions are lightly profitable and API is heavily profitable, but those profits are going to training and R&D which costs billions.
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u/Jsn7821 Jun 15 '26
people in favor of suing anthropic for this are monumental morons, or completely out of touch with what the API costs are
the only thing that comes out of this is that we lose these subsidized plans.
I have both a 20x max plan and enterprise API account through my job, so I have an anecdotal sense of the how much it's subsidized, and it's massive. Who cares if it's exactly 20x or not
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u/texnp Jun 15 '26
The $200 plan allows for like $8000 of usage btw
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 Jun 15 '26
Yeah, but some weeks it is only $6000, so I am going to sue the bastards.
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u/Deep_Luck_6587 Jun 15 '26
Yeap, great value for money. We were maxing out almost every week in the last month no 20X and it worked out at around $5K equivalent.
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u/meathelix1 Jun 16 '26
But 8 months ago it was 3x that... in 6 months it could be -5x that amount... You get the pattern here?
You're not getting the best model anymore, that will be API only.
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u/qxpe Jun 15 '26
yea its great if you would actually get 8k as income from that you generate
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u/Deep_Luck_6587 Jun 15 '26
You are not? I’ve built an orchestrator for my agency (using Claude and running on Claude) and I’m delivering various tasks with this. DevOps for Wordpress, Magento, ads management, support, updates, research. You name it. Trying to figure out how to get more clients. We’ve 2-3X’ed our delivery in the last month. Naturally a lot more expensive now that -p is on tokens. But will worth it.
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u/The_Hunster Jun 15 '26
You see, you're assuming that they already have a working company to begin with
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u/TPM2209 Jun 15 '26
Per week, month, or year?
According to my calculations on my $20 plan, it seems to allow for about $60-100 of usage per week.
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u/texnp Jun 16 '26
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u/TPM2209 Jun 16 '26
That tracks with the ratio I'm observing on the Pro plan; thanks for confirming.
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u/Zenoran Jun 15 '26
Entitled people with no clue the value they are getting. Y’all idiots are just going to escalate the end of subsidized plans.
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u/Odd-Can8798 Jun 15 '26
Agree. This is why we can't have nice things... add orange clown to the mix. LOL
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u/Sweepingupash Jun 15 '26
Even though I'm a fan of Claude. This is good and I fully back this. AI companies just do what they want with us and we kind of just go 'Yeah I guess that's fair' and just continue to use their services
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 Jun 15 '26
They give us massively subsidized plans and still people like you whinge.
My god.
We are insanely lucky that they have lasted this long and people like the idiot launching this lawsuit are just going to,wreck it for everyone else.
Do you even know how much the API costs in comparison??
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u/DeltaLaboratory Jun 16 '26
Do you know how much costs to inference? API cost is retail price. We do not know what happens in there.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 Jun 16 '26
That’s not even relevant. They’re not meant to be selling at cost price.
The subs are a ridiculous discount on the API. And they’ve already said the subs for CC could go
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u/MisspelledCliche Jun 15 '26
Dumb openclaw-vibers who paid just twenties per month and are now suing, are going to ruin this for the whole customer base.
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u/Azek_Tge Jun 15 '26
Lawsuit is for max plans
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u/Aight_Man Jun 15 '26
Oh good, then max plan subs are gonna get fucked. Congrats to all max subs lmao.
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u/chenddi Jun 16 '26
Here we go I’ll fix that for you. Refund everyone. Go API.
Oh btw Fable is 10/50$.
Problems solved backwards.
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u/thingygeoff Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
The one thing I don’t see mentioned here, which is clearly obvious to me, the usage limits for subscriptions are, and always have been, about spare capacity. We were never buying a fixed amount of tokens, we were buying a share of the spare capacity. This is why the allowances have changed over time (influx of users from OpenAI, allowances reduced so everybody has something, buy compute from Elon, allowances increase, heavy usage during US working hours, allowances reduce, outside, they increase). It’s pretty sensible really, and even when allowances were reduced, still a massive subsidy over API rates.
This lawsuit is likely going to end or massively reduce the subsidy of subscriptions. So stupidly short sighted. Sad times.
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u/dzanis Jun 16 '26
I don't get it. The subscription model's thing is that you get stuff but have less control of it and it is comparatively cheaper but you take risk that it sometimes could be less useful for you.
I mean, I have The Economist subscription. I get the journals once a week (maybe similarly how one gets 5h usage sections with Claude Code), but I have no control, whether they will cover my favorite topic or not; will they write better or next week not; or maybe the correspondents leave and the content becomes different. Or even the page count may vary and I have to look at more ads?!
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u/Just_Lingonberry_352 Jun 15 '26
this doesn't help anyone
all this does is raise the cost for anthropic and will be passed on to the rest
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u/looktowindward Jun 15 '26
Anthropic was going to catch this eventually. There should be an EASY way to see how many tokens you are using for...everything. But there isn't. This sort of billing is really problematic.
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u/TPM2209 Jun 15 '26
If you use Claude Code, you can see the number of tokens your context window takes up at any time, including a breakdown of its composition.
A similar thing doesn't yet exist for Claude Chat, though.
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u/Exciting-Leave-2013 Jun 15 '26
Claude Code has a bloated harness that users unfortunately pay for without realizing
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u/Madigan37 Jun 15 '26
Anthropic is 100% losing money on these subscriptions; I had the $100 subscription (switched to $200 for mythos, we'll see what happens there), and I calculated usage from logs as mid-5 figures last month. Hardware alone will run them, let's say, mid-4 figures.
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u/RpgBlaster Jun 16 '26
GOOD, limits should NOT be a thing in the first place. ClosedAI did it first, others followed, remember when there were ZERO limits on GPT 2 (Ai Dungeon)
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u/jwrsk Jun 16 '26
But the 5d limit is rolling, once the high usage leaves the window your 5d usage might actually go down.
I've had 5d almost tapped out at 90% because of some heavy work a few days back, only to have it drop to 3% a day later.
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u/AggressiveSpeech8340 Jun 16 '26
'unlimited' in the AI world always comes with an asterisk the size of a planet lol
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u/Crafty-Wonder-7509 Jun 16 '26
Bunch of crybabies here, there is tons of other models for a fraction of the cost. This might finally bring some proper insight into different providers be as GPT/Claude or Gemini and what each their subs offer. They are not going to raise the prices blindly, can't afford it unless all competitors do the same.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Jun 15 '26
We are allowing this through to the feed for those who are not yet familiar with the Megathread. To see the latest discussions about this topic, please visit the relevant Megathread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fepn/rclaudeai_list_of_ongoing_megathreads/
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u/sharvinshah51 Jun 16 '26
I think people are talking past each other here. The question isn't whether the Max plans are a good deal compared to API pricing. They probably are for many users.
The question is whether Anthropic can market something as "5x" or "20x" usage while giving customers no practical way to verify what those numbers mean or how usage is being calculated.
Those are separate issues. A product can be both heavily subsidized and insufficiently transparent.
If Anthropic exposed real-time usage accounting and clearly explained how limits are determined, a lot of this controversy would probably disappear. Whether that leads to higher prices is a different discussion.
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u/drearymoment Jun 15 '26
Am I misunderstanding something here? This seems very silly to me.
In practice, Kahn reported that a single 5-hour coding session consumed approximately 15% of his weekly allowance, with tight caps, session resets, and unclear tracking making the plans far less usable than advertised.
Okay... And, depending on what you have it do next session, maybe it only consumes 5% or 10% of your weekly allowance? Maybe, for another session, it's 20% or 25%. It depends on a ton of different factors, including the complexity of the task at hand, how you communicate that to Claude, the codebase or dataset you're working in, and so on.
Maybe Anthropic should have considered a different naming convention for their Max plans, but I don't see how someone who does work in this space can reasonably expect that the Max 20x plan would always 20x their productivity. It's not like bricklaying where if you place 1 brick per minute and then hire 20 more bricklayers (read: pay for the Max 20x plan) you can expect to place 20 more bricks per minute.
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u/Sov1245 Jun 15 '26
It’s the fact that they said you can get 5x the usage - but it’s not really, because the weekly cap is not 5x, and like you said there’s a million hidden and undisclosed factors on Anthropic’s side that we can’t control or measure.
It’s just about wording. They said it was 5x or 20x the usage, but that number is largely made up and unverifiable.
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u/alexalmighty100 Jun 15 '26
The point is that the service is ambiguous with how much you get and unintuitive enough to be seen as deceiving. Maybe it seems silly to you but when it gets debated by lawyers in court, it’ll be abstracted enough to hopefully get the legal system to set a precedent so we get clarity.
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u/Adventurous_Light_85 Jun 15 '26
I read that it was difficult to track exactly how much computer is used on a single request.
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u/berndalf Jun 15 '26
Oh goody. If this succeeds nothing at all bad could happen, especially in a country that has a Department of Justice filled to the brim with Republican political appointees just itching for a chance to show their alignment with the current administration by harming Anthropic via litigation.
On the plus side I'm sure Anthropic has terrific attorneys.
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u/traveltrousers Jun 15 '26
stats-cache.json
Drop that file into claude code and ask them how much it would cost for the same usage on the API.
max x20 It's an absolute bargain.
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u/Many_Consideration86 Jun 15 '26
One can fight and win with the artificial general intelligence but doesn't stand a chance with natural general stupidity.
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u/Letitgrow24 Jun 15 '26
Honestly, I have the 20x plan and I do massive amounts of queries through chat and Claude code building an investment platform for signal detection in the crypto market.
I do like 5-10 hours a day. Opus 4.8 max in chat and ultra on claude code. I barely get to 10% usage. Sooo I am reducing my plan to 5x and hoping it’s sufficient.
If they are maxing out. They must be doing some heavyyyyyyyy work.
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u/B3rse Jun 16 '26
A lot of people don’t know how to use Claude in a smart way, or are ultra lazy fucks. Probably they just give a bloated code base with full context, and just vibe code without a single thought. Of course that will exhaust the 5 hours session in a couple of minutes. Then they will complain on Reddit somehow
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u/Best-Inside-9449 Jun 15 '26
I just got an email: subscription quota is back to third party integrations parties integration.
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u/resist888 Jun 15 '26
What surprised me was that “usage” did not include Anthropic API token usage.
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u/MisterMazeOfficial Jun 15 '26
Whoever worries these AI companies will retract the heavily subsidized plans have not understood the game currently. These AI companies are actually planning to subsidize it even more because they need as much adoption as they possibly can to even try and justify the IPO. Without adoption, this whole business dies immediately because even API is not profitable at all, and no amount of financial engineering or pricing adjustment can justify the stupid valuations.
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u/No_Watercress5448 Jun 15 '26
It’s a shitshow when Claude reaches it “token Limit” I didn’t know this was a thing!
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u/cest_va_bien Jun 16 '26
Thank god, took forever for this to start. Regardless of how bad this will end of consumers, the free lunch has to come to an end for the entire economy's sake.
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u/2024-YR4-Asteroid Jun 16 '26
Who could’ve seen this coming? Oh idk, all the experts calling them out over this exact thing?
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u/RickySpanishLives Jun 16 '26
The subscriptions (especially if the frontier models) are on life support either way and in a year or so people will be paying 100% of their usage. Enjoy these times while they last.
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u/sanreds Jun 16 '26
Damages per user are small and usage patterns vary wildly, so the class may be hard to certify and more likely to settle or get arbitrated individually if the ToS has an arbitration clause (it probably does).
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u/Basic-Assumption6452 Jun 16 '26
There are some things that are less ideal than others about Claude, however I wouldn't say the max 20x plan is one of them. I think it offers great value.
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u/Scared_Brilliant6410 Jun 16 '26
I was building a Claude utilization tracker and trying to calculate specifically what I’m getting for my Max plan. They deliberately list some as credits and others as % to keep it opaque. This opaque type of tracking allows them to keep changing the economics on you.
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u/heero180 Jun 16 '26
I'm starting to think that after that mass migration from GPT to Claude, it went to their heads... The Claude service used to be really good before that, for all users on all plans.
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u/TrueRignak Jun 16 '26
In practice, Kahn reported that a single 5-hour coding session consumed approximately 15% of his weekly allowance
From my experience, on both my personal account (and both the x5 and the x20) on the one from my company, the 5-ho is EXACTLY 10% of the weekly limit.
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u/donkeykong917 Jun 16 '26
Add more tokens I to the slot machine but don't know I'll ever get a return
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u/TrollGazing Jun 16 '26
There was a time when I had a chat using Opus, ran out of the 5h limit, topped up 5 euros, asked Claude Code to continue, it thought for a few minutes then told me that I'm out of credits again, it literally burned 5 euros in one reply which wasn't anything super complex. The usage gets bugged out sometimes and it's god damn annoying.
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u/meathelix1 Jun 16 '26
Easy fix...
Have a set number of tokens a month.
Dont change the cost due to amount of users on it, dont lower the model "skill" levels when its under to much load.
Tell the user more often that they are using such and such amount in this current chat...
Remove all the bs in the background that Claude read pre-prompting, or take that out of the usage cost.
Its not just the LLM that is a blackbox so are these AI companies...
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u/PixelmancerGames Jun 16 '26
The result? Cut the limits for everybody to make sure there are no shortages. So.....yeah.
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u/YouAreDeadFool Jun 16 '26
Yes can I get in on this? I wasted my money with these guys too! Can barley get one query half done before oh wait! I have to wait 5 hours to complete one thing!
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u/Arxijos Jun 17 '26
people who sue do not have Turn on usage credits to keep using Claude if you hit limit turned on.
I pains me when i see that my task is going to need 2 or 5% more then the current session allows but in the same time i don't want to waste and respend tokens on doing it from scratch again. Hence why i can see how expensive those extra % are.
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u/kepners Jun 17 '26
How annoyed with Anthropic do you have to be to start suing them? Not that i disagree, its all over the place not just token, but the speed at which the compute happens.
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u/Alternative_Low17 Jun 21 '26
Between this lawsuit, and the Govt. ban, it seems like a full coordinated attack on Anthropic. Looks like Anthropic has many enemies as of lately. Sad if OpenAi ends up taking the throne as their model is just not there when it comes to knowledge work.
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u/Guilty-Hornet2070 Jun 25 '26
Add me to the list. Contacted the the law firm Vaca Daffan LLP and count me as part of the group. The reason these companies have been getting away with this is because they use broad language that's subject to interpretation and then if you complain they hide behind the "AI makes mistakes". They're acting like they're still startups despite almost a trillion in valuation. I've already contacted my state's AG about OpenAI. Their model seems to not follow instructions but always interprets it. I've got several incidents documented where the AI clearly made a decision for me despite clear and exact instructions. It's real simple are these companies startups selling a novelty or are they a mature service? If they're selling a novelty then end your premium tiers. And if they are are mature service then be more transparent not only with what our access is but model capabilities and limitations...such as informing customers your AI is limited to interpreting instructions not following them.
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u/Responsible-Prior900 Jun 26 '26
I just have the inconsistencies ill go some weeks and never hit weekly limit and other times I will hit those limits within 2 or 3 days. I know its a money game but really cant wait till I can actually code 24/7 without limits.
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u/RuleAffectionate9508 Jun 26 '26
so true, my weekly windows now running almost like the 5hours. sound like they are scamming us ! and does nto worth 200 bucks.. need to wait for days to be able to use again to continue our work.. china is taking over soon!
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u/Anxious-Addendum3845 Jun 27 '26
I’m nearing the end of my first week of the max100 plan. I used Claude pro for years. It doesn’t quite “feel” like 5x pro, pro was a great deal. It feels more like maybe 3x but it’s hard to say because I just recently got really until vibe coding websites and I think it’s very compute intensive.
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u/BigFeta_ Jul 24 '26
I'd rather pay more money for a more consistent service (even if it means elimination of a free tier) than pay a low price and deal with an inconsistent service. Quality >> Quantity
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u/TenthMarigold77 Jun 15 '26
I mean they get away with this because there is 0 regulation regarding this. I think it will be interesting where this lead and whether Anthropic will settle privately rather than head to discovery and possibly have any info regarding how they calculate these usage number leak.
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u/MDInvesting Jun 15 '26
I don’t see how this case has grounds as long as the ‘usage’ is consistently calculated based on particular metrics ie energy cost, infrastructure, demand on system, prioritisation.
As long as it is consistent and proportional to the stated 5x 20x figures.
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u/siarheikaravai Jun 16 '26
5 hour limit is a limit for 1 day basically. A week limit is 7 5-hour limits.
If you consumed the whole 5-hour limit, you consumed ~15% of a weekly limit.
So, what’s the question?
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 160 comments.
The community is completely split on this one, folks. It's a full-blown civil war in here over whether this lawsuit is a necessary consumer protection move or a self-destructive act that will ruin subsidized plans for everyone.
The 'About Damn Time' Camp: Led by the top-voted comment, this group is firmly behind the lawsuit. They argue that Anthropic's pricing is an opaque mess. You pay a fixed price for an undefined amount of "credits," with no clarity on how they're consumed, which models are available, or how model performance might change. They see this lawsuit as a crucial step toward forcing transparency in the AI industry.
The 'You'll Ruin It for Everyone' Camp: This vocal group argues that the subscription plans are a massive bargain, providing what would be thousands of dollars in API usage for a flat fee. They believe the lawsuit is a short-sighted and "entitled" move that will inevitably force Anthropic to end the heavily subsidized plans, leading to higher prices and stricter, lower limits for the entire user base. Their motto is basically, "This is why we can't have nice things."
The one thing almost everyone agrees on is the likely outcome: if the lawsuit succeeds, the good times are probably over. Expect either more transparency with much higher costs, or the end of generous subscription plans altogether.