Anthropic has been sued in federal court over access to its premium Claude AI subscription plans, according to a new report.
The Wall Street Journal detailed that a customer is seeking for the suit to get class-action status on behalf of others who have also purchased the plan.
Filed on Monday, it claims that the company misled consumers about usage limits of "Max 5x" and "Max 20x" subscription plans.
The outlet noted that subscribers were promised five to 20 times the computing access available to those with the base Pro plan, which costs between $17 and $20 an month. However, it claims, the real limits were much lower.
"The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage," the lawsuit claims. Plaintiff Carl Kahn said a single session of work that lasted five hours consumed about 15% of his weekly allotment.
The company has been dominating headlines over the past days, particularly as a result on restrictions on its latest AI models and forced the company to disable access worldwide.
The company reportedly dispatched senior technical staff to Washington to meet White House officials following administration action against the company's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.
The talks follow a Trump administration order barring foreign governments, companies and individuals from using Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. As a result, Anthropic disabled access to the models globally to comply with the restrictions.
The San Francisco-based startup had previously limited access to its powerful Mythos model because of concerns about its cybersecurity capabilities. Earlier this week, Anthropic released Fable 5, a public-facing version of the technology that included what the company described as additional cybersecurity safeguards.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the dispute intensified after researchers at Amazon demonstrated ways some of Fable's safeguards could be bypassed to obtain information about software vulnerabilities. The findings prompted discussions among White House officials about how to respond to the model's capabilities.
Anthropic said Friday that the vulnerabilities identified by Amazon researchers were relatively basic and that comparable information could be obtained through other publicly available AI systems. Some cybersecurity experts have argued that the findings did not amount to a full jailbreak of the model and reflected capabilities that can also assist network defenders and software security teams.
The dispute has drawn attention from the cybersecurity community. On Sunday, a group of cybersecurity experts signed a letter urging the administration to reverse the restrictions, arguing that access to advanced AI systems can help identify and patch software vulnerabilities. The letter stated that the controls had removed important tools from defenders while creating uncertainty around U.S. AI leadership.
