THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Magistrate Judge Alex Tse of the Northern District of California let negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract claims proceed against Anthropic, as reported by Courthouse News and relayed by TNW and Glitchwire.
  • The plaintiffs say the $100 and $200 Max plans, sold as giving 5x and 20x Pro usage, delivered about 3.5x and 6x over a week on one model, because the multiples applied per five-hour session.
  • Claims under California's unfair competition and false advertising laws were dismissed; no class has been certified and no court has found that Anthropic misled anyone.

A federal judge in California has allowed part of a proposed class action against Anthropic to move forward over how the company marketed its Claude Max subscriptions. Magistrate Judge Alex Tse of the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Friday, November 6, in Kahn v. Anthropic, according to Courthouse News, whose report was relayed by TNW and Glitchwire. TNW notes it had not read the order itself.

What the plaintiffs allege

The suit was filed in June by two subscribers, Karl Kahn and Solomon Smith. Anthropic sold its $100 and $200 monthly Max plans as offering five and 20 times more usage than the Pro plan. The plaintiffs argue that over a full week the plans give far less. Using one Claude model, they calculated that the $200 plan provided roughly six times Pro's weekly usage and the $100 plan about 3.5 times. The gap, they say, comes from the fact that the multiples apply to each five-hour session, while weekly caps, which Glitchwire says were added in mid-2025, were not scaled by the same factors.

What the judge decided

Anthropic argued that customers should have understood the extra usage as a per-session promise and pointed to a help page explaining this. Tse was not persuaded at this stage. He noted that the per-session explanation sat "two hyperlinks away" from the main sales pages, and that because customers pay monthly they could reasonably read the promise as applying over the month.

The negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract claims survive, as does Smith's claim under a California consumer protection statute. Tse dismissed claims under California's unfair competition and false advertising laws; Glitchwire reports that this was because both plaintiffs remain subscribers and had not shown standing to seek an order changing the ads. Kahn's consumer-law claim was dismissed with leave to add detail, and a claim that Anthropic unfairly tightened limits during billing periods was rejected.

Context and next steps

The ruling only means the case can continue: no class has been certified and no court has found that Anthropic misled customers. Neither party responded to Courthouse News. According to Glitchwire, the plaintiffs have until December 2 to file an amended complaint. The dispute concerns the plans' former names; Anthropic recently renamed Max 5x as Max and Max 20x as Ultra, keeping prices unchanged, Glitchwire reports.