Anthropic Hit With Class Action Over Claude Max Caps as Congress Moves to Rebuild Crypto Theft Task Force

Crypto News

Anthropic was named in a proposed class action on June 15 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, with a paying user alleging the company oversold its Claude Max subscriptions. The complaint targets the $100 Max 5x and $200 Max 20x tiers, arguing the advertised five-times and twenty-times usage boosts over the $20 Pro plan collapsed under hidden caps. Plaintiff Karl Kahn, based in Washington, says he upgraded to the top tier for heavy coding work and hit limits almost immediately. The suit seeks refunds and damages for everyone who bought either tier since launch. The tools increasingly resemble an AI trading bot in their always-on intensity.

The case turns on how the caps stack. Usage resets on five-hour rolling windows, then a separate weekly limit caps total activity, and the filing argues neither was clear enough for subscribers to track. According to the complaint, one five-hour session consumed roughly 15% of Kahn's entire weekly quota — a pace that, he contends, made the promised twenty-times boost mathematically impossible during sustained sessions. The plaintiff frames the marketed multipliers as a representation that never held in practice. Anthropic declined to comment. The dispute echoes broader friction over opaque metering across the AI sector, where heavy users struggle to map advertised allowances to real workloads, much like managing an AI crypto wallet with shifting rules.

The throttling complaints are not new. Anthropic added weekly caps in late August 2025 after power users ran Claude Code almost continuously, with limits resetting every seven days. The company said at the time the change would affect fewer than 5% of subscribers. Yet frustration has compounded as intensive use scales dramatically: one enterprise client reportedly ran up a $500 million bill in a single month, illustrating how quickly costs and consumption can balloon. The class seeks status for all Max 5x and Max 20x buyers since the tiers launched in April 2025, pursuing refunds under consumer protection law. The fight underscores how usage-based pricing remains a flashpoint for compute-hungry customers.

Separately, Washington is moving to rebuild federal coordination against digital asset crime. Representatives Lance Gooden and Josh Gottheimer introduced the Federal Cryptocurrency Theft Enforcement and Coordination Act, which would establish a Federal Cryptocurrency Theft Task Force inside the Justice Department under the attorney general or a designee, per a June 11 announcement. The measure deliberately avoids market regulation, instead focusing on the hacks, scams, and coercion cases that keep hitting users. It would make the task force the primary federal coordination body for preventing, investigating, and prosecuting crypto theft. The bill arrives as policymakers try to shift digital asset markets away from enforcement-first uncertainty toward clearer rules for altcoin and broader token activity.

The proposal directly responds to a structural gap. The Justice Department's April 2025 memo ended what Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called regulation by prosecution, disbanding the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and steering one DOJ unit away from crypto enforcement. The memo instructed prosecutors to focus on individual criminal misuse of digital assets rather than treating the industry itself as a target. That posture eased pressure on builders but left victims of thefts and hacks with thinner federal coordination. The new House bill preserves the lighter market stance while drawing a clear line: reduced policing of crypto markets paired with stronger, dedicated response when someone actually loses funds.

The bill's design is operational rather than regulatory. The text names senior representatives from the DOJ, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security including Homeland Security Investigations, and the Treasury including FinCEN, while granting the attorney general authority to add other federal law-enforcement agencies. The task force's duties center on developing best practices for evidence collection, analysis of seized digital evidence, investigative techniques, asset tracing, and victim engagement. It would also provide technical assistance, training, and guidance to state and local law enforcement and prosecutors, and share information across federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial agencies — a coordination layer aimed squarely at the cross-jurisdictional nature of crypto theft.

Both stories trace a single arc: as AI and crypto infrastructure scale, accountability frameworks are scrambling to catch up — through litigation in one case and legislation in the other. COINOTAG's aggregate market data underscores how fragile sentiment remains as that catch-up plays out. The Fear & Greed Index sits at 20 of 100, squarely in Extreme Fear, while Bitcoin dominance has climbed to 69.7% and total crypto market capitalization stands near $1.93 trillion, signaling capital concentration in majors during a defensive, bear market stretch. Regulatory rebuilding around theft enforcement and clearer consumer expectations for compute could prove stabilizing — but for now, our data shows risk appetite remains thin across the board.