A suit says Claude Max 20x delivers 6 to 8 times Pro, not 20

A proposed class action alleges that Anthropic’s Claude Max 20x plan, sold as twenty times the usage of the Pro tier, actually delivers six to eight times it, and that Max 5x delivers about 3.5 times rather than five.

The claim is unusual in that its central evidence comes from Anthropic. The complaint rests on hour ranges the company itself described in July 2025 emails to subscribers, which turns the dispute from a measurement argument into a comparison between two sets of the seller’s own numbers.

What the complaint alleges

Kahn v. Anthropic, PBC, No. 3:26-cv-05763, was filed on June 14, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The named plaintiff, Karl Kahn, upgraded from Pro to Max 5x and then to Max 20x.

The pricing is the frame for the allegation. Pro runs $17 to $20 a month, Max 5x costs $100 and Max 20x costs $200. The proposed class covers US subscribers who bought or upgraded to either Max plan on Claude.com or through the desktop application from April 9, 2025, the date the tiers were announced, to the present.

Where the case stands

Kahn amended the complaint on July 20, 2026. Anthropic moved to dismiss the amended complaint on August 19, and Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse has set a hearing on that motion for November 6.

No class has been certified, no settlement exists, and none of the allegations has been tested. A separate suit against Anthropic over subscriber access, Pascual v. Anthropic, was expressly found unrelated to this case by the court in August.

The billing complaints running alongside it

Separately, and without any confirmation from Anthropic, individual subscribers have posted billing complaints about the same tiers. One account on r/ClaudeAI described two invoices arriving together, one for a Max 20x subscription the user said he “never knowingly signed up for,” and a usage meter climbing from 11 percent to 100 percent in 31 minutes with no session running.

That account is a single unverified report with no permalink available, and it alleges a different mechanism than the lawsuit does: faulty metering and unauthorized signup rather than overstated capacity. It is noted here as context for why the tiers are contested, not as evidence for the claims in court.