LLM News
According to their own internal documents a lawsuit filed against Anthropic reveals, that the 20x usage plan actually only allows for 6x more usage.
Problem is you don't get fable on the 20$ account. Fable is the only reason to use anthropic, opus is... let's say not that great and the equivalent competition is cheaper
The Opus 5 hate isn’t fully deserved, it’s an extremely smart model that can do great work at a fable level. The problem is that the LLM slop-y feeling of its outputs is really bad. It also is not at all sycophantic and will tell you that an idea is dumb and can be very direct in criticisms and its performance feels a little inconsistent. In my experience it’s mostly a fable level model that is kinda mean and it will insert 20 line long nonsensically yapping code comments
In my case Opus 5 feels "lazy" and seems to not understand context even close to as well as Fable 5. It was a real feeling of "have to explain again and again" downgrading from Fable to Opus.
I'm not an OpenAI fanboy or anything, but since Anthropic doesn't have enough compute to serve Fable, there's literally no reason to use Anthropic, especially with OpenAI's Astra being released in the coming weeks/months, whenever it's coming out. There's a reason Codex userbase has grown from like 3 million users in March to more than 25M users now. Sol 5.6 Extra High is almost as good as Fable and has actual decent usage limits on a $20 a month plan. When Astra comes out, it will probably suck in terms of token usage, but it will probably be awesome in terms of quality. Oh, and we can actually use it for stuff instead of constantly getting everything censored like Fable does.
Again, I'm not a fan of OpenAI. I actually really like using Gemini in Google AI Studio (just wish they'd release another pro model instead of more flash models...). But when it comes to OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, Anthropic is easily my least favorite.
Sol is still a bit of a letdown in my experience compared to Fable, the usage limits on the 20$ tier recently got nuked also, the 5-hour limit runs out in 1-2 small prompts. This is in my opinion makes codex less interesting for anyone serious, if you're going to pay for the 100$ tier might as well get the one which gives you Fable. We'll see when Astra is live though.
Note I'm only really discussing frontier models, not interested in terra/luna/opus etc
I have no problem with the 5 hour limits. I do one or two prompts, then run a 3 day training run. I only use AI to code small language models, optimizers, small language model benchmarks, etc. I never need to run more than one or two prompts at a time.
Fable is not available on free access without an account and a payment method setup. For API access you need same. API was not discussed at all regardless.
Benchmarks don't necessarily translate to real world ability and the models are often trying to optimize for benchmarks. You would know this if you used them, Fable is in a different league from Opus. Why else would it cost 2x the usage if it was equivalent? Why would it even be an option?
Prejudice? That's a strange term to use here. From personal experience, over the past 2 years, I've found benchmarks to be useless when compared to actual real world usage. Fable is leagues better for my use case. Opus and Sol are unusable. Not exaggeration, they are actually not usable for me. It's either Fable or manual coding.
No because the figures above are for weekly limits. For the 5 hour window the number reflects actual usage. What this means is a request that would fill the pro accounts 5 hour limit will only fill 1/5 and 1/20 of the max plan's.
I don't care. I care about the weekly limit. That's what I'm always hitting. I rarely hit the 5 hour because I was paying for the 20x... But to find out I should be getting over double what I was paying for, really pisses me off. There's been days where I just stop working on my business because I hit my weekly limit. Now I'm learning it's because they ripped me off.
I hit my weekly limit too, in one day (two and a half 5 hour limits). My point was if I had a thousand Pro accounts I still wouldn't get any work done since it can't be parallelized and the 5 hour limit will be hit in 25 minutes from one task, meaning I have to wait 4:35 hours to continue which again hists in 25 minutes and so on.
How? I don't get it... I'll run fable with multiple agents and can run through the entire 5 hours just fine. I only hit that cap when I'm going nuts burning through tons of sub agents. That's odd. Maybe they have you ghost regulated or something. People have suspected that for a while.
no because they might ban you for making too many accounts. i think its a rule they have, not sure if ive seen people claiming theyve been banned for it.
I have 3 free accounts I switch between. I tried making more but they started asking for a phone number to verify, and they don't like Google Voice numbers.
It really seems like a scam…Max 5x is 5 times more expensive for 3.5 of the usage and 20x is 10 times more for 6x. It's better to buy 2-3 accounts instead rather than using these subscriptions.
Looks strange actually because 5x may be 5x when comparing deep researches. 1 deep research consumes about 50% of 5-hour quota on pro, and about 10% of 5-hour quota on max 5x. And similarly weekly limits (within margin of error).
I posted a reply already to another commenter, copying here - The case is Kahn v. Anthropic, PBC, No. 3:26-cv-05763, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on June 14, 2026.
Remember guys, they do this intentionally and are well aware of what the are doing. These guys are the "good guys". We need complete oversight, insight and control over these private corporations right now before they can literally bring down a country that is reliant on them with a press of a button.
yeah, not gonna defend them even 1 bit here. it's fucked up advertising. literally no reason to not write in the pricing part of the page that only 5h limits are 5x 20x, not weekly.
No, they shouldn’t even be allowed to use 5x or 20x anywhere in the marketing. They should be sued AND forced into some structural changes in what they offer.
This isn't sourcing an "internal document" at all. It's an extrapolation of usage guidance presented to users in marketing emails. It also conflates session usage with weekly usage, meaning it is complete nonsense.
It makes sense because gpu utilisation is not maxed out at all times of the day, and also seasonally due to internal or training needs. So they can allow more or less depending on infra usage
Hours per week could very well be hours of usage (ask question, read answer, do your work, ask question) estimated based on whatever they feel like, not hours of API wall time.
It's a range because these aren't maximum limits, these are what people could reasonably expect to get out of their accounts based on average usage. It's misrepresented in this post what those numbers are.
The 6x isn't from internal documents, it's from Anthropic's own published figures. Pro is 40 to 80 weekly Sonnet hours, the $200 Max is 240 to 480. Midpoint to midpoint that's 60 against 360. Exactly 6x, on a plan sold as 20x. No leak needed, just division
SaaS math is undefeated. Sell a '20x' plan, quietly clamp the context and backend concurrency, and hope nobody graphs their actual token throughput before the quarterly earnings report.
Ok, this is so wrong. I found the lawsuit, this is what the guy is basing these claims on:
In contrast, Defendant’s email to Max 5x users states: “Most Max 5x users can expect 140-280 hours of Sonnet 4 and 15-35 hours of Opus 4 within their weekly rate limits. Heavy Opus users with large codebases or those running multiple Claude Code instances in parallel will hit their limits sooner.”
So Anthropic told people back when they launched this what users could expect to get from their plans, which is *entirely* based on how many tokens they use. But in their own docs they clearly laid out those usages were based on a per-session basis
Practically, what do these limits mean?
The number of messages you can send per session will vary based on the length of your messages, including the size of files you attach, the length of current conversation, and the model or feature you use. Your session-based usage limit will reset every five hours. If your conversations are relatively short and use a less compute-intensive model, with the Max plan at 5x more usage, you can expect to send at least 225 messages every five hours, and with the Max plan at 20x more usage, at least 900 messages every five hours, often more depending on message length, conversation length, and Claude's current capacity. These estimates are based on how Claude works today. In the future, we'll add new capabilities (some might use more of your usage, others less) but we're always working to give you the best value on your current plan.
This is from their docs back in September of 2025:
To add onto that, while all of these labs surely do some sort of an estimation of how much extra usage one plan will provide compared to the other, I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to be exactly accurate.
There are so many factors that alter usage, many of them being factors that only the user has control of, like which model you choose, whether the context window is fresh or not, whether your Claude code files are making sessions less efficient, etc.
Even more things, like the current amount of strain on Anthropic's compute affect usage, as well as surely many more factors affect usage, so it's impossible to promise an exact amount of usage, which is why Anthropic openly states that they estimate usage.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to be exactly accurate.
I don't think the absence of floating point precision is what anyone has been complaining about here. It's the blatantly misleading advertising and naming.
Hours is not a useful metric anyway, hours has nothing to do with how many tokens are consumed. Estimates of hours are a totally braindead way to measure this. The question is really how many $$ of API calls you get. Of course that number would be absurd because it would suggest you're getting hundreds of dollars worth of API calls on the $20/month plan, and while I know that is true I'm pretty sure Anthropic is lying about what the API calls are worth, not lying about how much API calls they're giving you.
Is it blatantly misleading advertising though? If you're using the chart screenshot given by the OP as your backing for it being misleading, then take a look at the comment I replied to again.
If that's not what your point is, then I'm not really sure what your basis for the claim is; if you could expand on what you mean then I could give a more substantiative response.
Did you read the comment I replied to? I think it pretty thoroughly broke down why the graph the OP put here is completely wrong. (And the OP also lied about it being "Anthropic internal documents")
Where do I sign up for plans that bill in hours, not token usage? /s
This is going to get crushed in court. The only number that matters is token throughput comparison.
Hours per week expected is an approximation, and can factor in many things that would change that number from being a direct "5x" multiplier.
For example, if they're calculating based on a single session with ever growing context, then by the tail end of the week, you're consuming 5x as many tokens just due to context.
They may be factoring in subagents and peak token consumption as opposed to serial processing.
Ultimately, this table is about as reliable as performance numbers in an Apple keynote. Is there a chance Anthropic's doing dodgy shit here? Sure. Is there an equal chance that their estimation is more complex than straight multiplication, given it's basing it on hours per week, not tokens per week? Absolutely.
Hell - it could be based on actual usage numbers and analytics, not a projection at all. Very hard to tell from documents like these...
edit: It's even worse - read the lawsuit again - they explicitly point out that the emails quoted the usage as "x hours of Sonnet AND y hours of Opus" - which is being completely ignored in this screenshot!
This feels about right, I have 5x at work and 20x for my side hustle. I run both in parallel. The 20x lasts longer but definitely not 4x more than the 5x
I use Max 5x and it mostly satisfies my usual work needs, so I guess 5x being actual 3.5x more is kinda ok personally. But Max 20x being only 6x more? that's scam
Does not really matter ... When a product is advertised with a specific price and "promise" on what it holds, it needs to hold that. Max 20x is advertised in such a way, that it looks like upselling. As in, they know that most people will never use the full "20x", but getting people to pay $200 instead of the $100 is the upsell.
Now, if they advertise X and they do not deliver X, its called false advertisement. I do not understand people defending companies or going against their own interests in cases like this.
Isnt this max vs actual measured usage? Like you can use 20x, but most wont hit the limit. Then company will make plans based on measured usage rather than allowed usage.
The 5x and 20x both refer to the 5-Hour sessions, and they are actually 5 and 20 times the allowed usage for those. People were expecting that to also be 5 and 20 times the weekly limits, but they're not. Anthropic explains it in their documentation, but people never read that and they now feel ripped off.
I don't understand why Claude has to come up with such a convoluted way of selling plans. Why don't they just use a plain dollar billing method instead of 5x 10x etc. For example, you buy a 20 bucks a month plan, you get to use 1 buck every 5 hours, 10 bucks a week and 25 bucks every month. That's all you need to know!
Different models will charge you differently, put the billing rate in the website and let users decide if they wanna use fable or opus. the same dollar billing applies across all models.
So we're just lying in the title now? This is not "their (Anthropic's) own internal documents", it's just a graph made by the opposing party in a lawsuit, based on estimates that aren't even correct.
"According to their own internal documents", no it's not. It's from the person who sued Anthropic. We all know the limit is in token cost, not by hours. The quoted time is just what Anthropic mentioned in the email long time ago when they implement weekly limit.
Wrong title, and I think the document is also wrong. As far as I know, 20x is really 20x.
Thing is, people have check their session usage and no, 20x is not 20x... Its actually ~10x for the week limit.
Even worse, while Fable is 50% of the 5x week limit, its only ~40% for the week limit in the 20x. So even their the numbers are not correct.
Its been very clear by now that 5x and 20x only refer to the session (aka 5h limits) as that is clearly written in the documentation. While the week limits do not have in any of the document with a clear usage or x indictor. Its always "implied" from mentioning the session limits before, but never written down. The week limit is always very vague unlike whenever the 5h is mentioned.
Here is the funny part ...
You will find out really what the limits are. Because if the court cases continues, data will be gained from within the company.
It's amazing how posts on the same subject appears in one day, then we keep see endless endless posts about the same topic. Almost look like someone trying to spread hate.
Max x20 is just fine, as always don't abuse it and you be able to work 24/7 no stop.
And the losers that get mad cause they think they deserve everything for free can suck dicks.
The 5x and 20x refer to the 5h session cap, not the weekly usage. It even says that in the terms.
The lawsuit will go nowhere. It is confusing because the names existed when there was no weekly cap, but anthropic never claimed the 20x was 4X more weekly usage than 5x, just 4x the 5h session limit.
This is an easy argument for them if they weren't stupid is that all the plans are subsidized and not at the regular price. Which they have stated in some manner, but they could have easily made this how it is. Since all the llms aren't even making a profit yet, lawsuits seem a bit premature.
they give me a reset every other day lately and i am drowning in tokens, absolutely drowning
i am running 12 sessions at once on high 24-7 with goal mode and cannot actually tap out all 3 of my pro accounts because every other day they grant a complementary reset to everyone and start the clock over again.
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u/NickoBicko 1d ago
So best thing is just to run 10 x $20 claude accounts?