A US magistrate judge ruled that Anthropic must face central claims that advertising for its Claude Max subscriptions misled customers about included usage. The decision keeps alive allegations over $100 and $200 Max plans sold as offering five and 20 times more use than the Pro plan. For buyers of AI tools, the case tests how subscription capacity promises are interpreted when session limits and weekly caps differ.
How the court treated the usage claims
The proposed class action, Kahn v. Anthropic, is pending in federal court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs are Karl Kahn and Solomon Smith, who filed the lawsuit in June. Magistrate Judge Alex Tse issued the ruling on dismissal motions on Friday, as reported by Courthouse News. He dismissed several claims while allowing claims for negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract to move forward.
The dispute turns on the difference between use allowed in each five-hour session and use allowed over a full week. Max subscribers receive five or 20 times more use per five-hour session, yet their weekly limits are not five or 20 times higher. For one Claude model, the plaintiffs calculated that the $200 plan provides six times the weekly usage of Pro, while the $100 plan provides 3.5 times. That measurement frames the alleged gap between the headline multiplier and realized weekly capacity.
Anthropic argued that customers should have understood the multiplier as applying per session and pointed to an explanation on a help page. The judge was not persuaded by that defense at this stage. He noted that the per-session disclosure sits two hyperlinks away from the primary sales pages on claude. com. Because customers pay monthly, he found they could reasonably read the promise as applying over the month, not only inside short sessions.
What this means for corporate AI buyers
For companies that buy seats of coding assistants and chat models, the practical issue is capacity planning across a team rather than a single session. A small firm with a few heavy users may feel a weekly ceiling quickly, while a larger organization may distribute work and notice uneven exhaustion of limits. Contract language that states whether multipliers, credits, or quotas apply per session, per week, or per billing period therefore affects budgeting and staffing decisions. Procurement teams now have a reason to request that definition in writing before committing to higher tiers.
The ruling does not establish that every advertising statement was unlawful, and several theories were removed or narrowed. Claims under two California laws concerning unfair business practices and false advertising were dismissed. Kahn received leave to add detail to a state consumer-law claim, while Smith's claim under that law survived. A separate theory that Anthropic acted unfairly by tightening usage limits during billing periods was rejected. Separately, Anthropic renamed the Max plans last week, and neither side immediately responded to Courthouse News.
The marker to watch is how the surviving negligent misrepresentation and breach-of-contract claims develop in the Northern District of California, including any amended filing by Kahn and further orders on class scope. If the court requires clearer alignment between headline multipliers and weekly or monthly allowances, vendors will likely revise pricing pages and help documentation. That outcome would give business buyers a more reliable basis for comparing Pro-style and Max-style AI subscriptions.
