Former FTC lawyers sue Anthropic over the five-hour window behind Claude Max's 20x

Monica Vaca, one of the two former FTC lawyers behind the expanded complaint, says Claude users tend to hit a limit while working on something, upgrade on the spot, and only afterwards notice they are not getting the usage they thought they bought ^[7]. That is the moment the Max price card is built for. It is also the worst possible moment to read a definition that sits two hyperlinks deep and then on a different plan's page ^[5].

Pro is $20 a month, Max is $100 for "5x" and $200 for "20x" ^[3]. The $200 tier asks ten times Pro's price for twenty times the usage; the $100 tier asks five times the price for five times the usage ^[16]. Whatever else the cheaper Max tier is, it is priced in exact proportion to its own headline number, so the multiplier has to hold for the tier to make arithmetic sense. The complaint alleges the multiplier applies inside rolling five-hour windows that sit under a weekly cap, and that the real increase in total capacity is much smaller ^[4]. A seven-day week contains 33.6 five-hour windows ^[17]. How many of them the weekly cap actually lets a subscriber fill is not something a buyer can work out, which is Vaca's point about auditability turned into a spreadsheet problem: she says customers have no way to audit the black box and are relying on the marketer's claims ^[12].

Anthropic's answer, in a motion to dismiss the earlier version of the case, was not that the session limits were hidden. It was that reaching them "required nothing more than clicking hyperlinks available in the purchase process, the digital equivalent of flipping a product over to read the back label" ^[10]. That earlier complaint was filed in July, withdrawn, and refiled as the expanded class action ^[9]. On one point the record is thinner than the framing around it: Max was announced in April 2025 and the weekly limits were imposed in August ^[8], but The Verge's account describes no notice to existing subscribers when that happened ^[18]. Anthropic did not respond to The Verge's request for comment ^[11]. Anthropic says power users are central to its business, and it has cut off other popular applications, OpenClaw among them, to keep serving them ^[13].

Teams tend to assume users work a pricing page the way it was written: read the grid, follow the footnote, choose deliberately. What users actually do is hit a wall, press whichever button in the flow removes the wall, and work until the wall returns. A Reddit subscriber quoted in The Verge's report described the mismatch more usefully than most internal docs, saying the weekly allowance is what the pricing page makes you think you are buying while the rolling five-hour window is what controls whether you can work, like a bigger gas tank with the pump still limited to a gallon every five hours ^[6].

The forcing function is a two-column list rather than a 2x2. Column one: every limiter in the product, the per-window ones alongside the weekly ones. Column two: how often each is the first thing a paying customer runs into, which your support queue can already tell you. If the limiter at the top of column two is not the number printed on the price card, the card describes a product your customers do not have. Anthropic's version of that gap is now in front of a court ^[1].