Judge lets Claude Max “20x usage” lawsuit go ahead

A federal magistrate judge in San Francisco ruled on November 6 that Anthropic must face a proposed class action accusing it of misleading buyers by advertising Claude Max as giving “5x or 20x more usage” than cheaper plans, Reuters reported. The ruling settles no facts. It sends the core claims into evidence-gathering after US Magistrate Judge Alex Tse found the plaintiffs plausibly alleged that consumers could read the ads as promising five or 20 times more usage over a whole month.

Tse let three claims proceed: deceptive advertising under California consumer law, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract. He dismissed others, including one under the state’s unfair competition law, and allowed the plaintiffs to file an amended complaint.

The dispute is over what the multiplier counts. The suit says subscribers on the $100 and $200 monthly plans do get five or 20 times Pro’s usage per five-hour session, but remain under weekly caps that are not five or 20 times higher. Anthropic’s Max usage page defines 5x and 20x as usage per session against Pro. Sessions reset every five hours, and a weekly cap across all models sits on top, shared by Claude, Claude Code and Cowork, so the advertised number governs only the five-hour window.

Anthropic argued that reasonable consumers would understand “5x or 20x more usage” to mean per session, and pointed to disclosures on its website. Tse said those disclosures were too removed from the company’s primary sales pages to justify dismissing the case at this stage.

The case began as an individual suit by Karl Kahn, filed on June 14, which put the delivered multiples at roughly 3.5x and 6-8x of Pro. In September it became a proposed class action brought by two Max subscribers, Kahn and Solomon Smith, a computer-science student who said he used Claude for coding projects and other work. It seeks class status on behalf of thousands of Claude subscribers in Karl Kahn and Solomon Smith v. Anthropic PBC, in the Northern District of California.

Glenn Danas, a lawyer for Smith, said on Monday that the order lets “our most important claims proceed” while offering “a straightforward path to amendment for the claims that were dismissed.”