Anthropic faces a class-action lawsuit alleging its Claude Max subscriptions provide far less access than advertised to users. Plaintiff Karl Kahn, a Washington, D.C., resident, claims the effective caps for the Max 5x and Max 20x options fall below the usage levels Anthropic markets on its website and other materials. The lawsuit seeks to represent U.S. consumers who purchased Max subscriptions since the tiers were introduced last year.

Anthropic offers three paid plans for individuals, including Claude Pro starting at $17 per month. According to its website, the Pro plan "offers at least five times the usage per session compared to our free service" during peak hours, with message limits varying based on length, attachments, and model features. The company later introduced Max plans priced at $100 and $200 per month, advertised to provide up to 5x and 20x the Pro plan's limits respectively.

Kahn argues in the complaint that "the actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage." After upgrading to the Max 20x plan in April, he reports encountering weekly ceilings quickly, including a five-hour period that consumed 15% of his weekly allotment. The filing highlights a gap between marketed capabilities and actual user experience.

Usage for Claude Code was constrained by weekly limits in July after some customers ran the tool "continuously in the background, 24/7." The underlying metric for usage is "tokens," the units large language models process to handle prompts and generate outputs. Costs can fluctuate significantly based on prompt complexity, complicating the application of standard subscription models to compute-intensive AI services.

Anthropic declined to comment on the lawsuit when contacted by email. The case raises questions about transparency in subscription models for AI services, where variable costs and technical constraints may conflict with flat-rate pricing expectations.

Anthropic is moving to take greater control of the computing infrastructure that powers its AI models, pursuing data center leases that would place the company in direct control of operating its own facilities. The effort could secure vast amounts of power-intensive capacity as the company positions itself for its initial public offering.

Infrastructure Expansion

Anthropic has assembled more than a dozen preliminary agreements tied to U.S. data centers representing more than 1 gigawatt of capacity, according to The Information and Reuters. The company is exploring ways for Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google to help support the financial commitments associated with those leases. Under the arrangements under discussion, Google could provide guarantees tied to Anthropic's lease obligations, helping the startup shoulder the enormous costs of securing computing infrastructure. The Information also reported that Google co-designs some of the server chips Anthropic may ultimately deploy at those facilities.

Strategic Positioning

The expansion underscores the escalating race among leading AI developers to lock down the computing power needed to train and run increasingly sophisticated models. Surging demand for Anthropic's Claude models has already pushed the company to pursue additional capacity through large-scale infrastructure agreements. Earlier this month, Anthropic disclosed that it had confidentially filed paperwork for a U.S. initial public offering. The company has not yet determined how many shares it would sell or what price it would seek in an offering.

The Billion-Dollar Race For AI Computing Power

The infrastructure push comes as Anthropic's valuation continues to climb. Anthropic's latest funding round valued the startup at $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI as the most valuable startup, after raising $65 billion in Series H. Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital led the funding round. In April, Anthropic also said Alphabet was committing up to $40 billion in the company, Bloomberg reported.

"This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," said Krishna Rao, CFO of Anthropic.

Earlier this week, Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, its most capable consumer-facing AI model to date. The company said Fable 5 excels at coding, research and other knowledge-intensive tasks, particularly over long and complex workloads. If Anthropic goes public at a $1 trillion valuation, it would instantly rank among the most valuable companies globally and could become the second- or third-largest IPO in history, trailing SpaceX and Saudi Aramco.