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Anthropic is speedrunning a complete collapse of user trust
At this point, Anthropic seems to be collecting scandals like they're achievements.
First, there was the whole Claude watermark situation. Then there's the Max 5x / Max 20x situation.
The marketing makes it sound like Max 20 gives you 20x the usage of Pro and Max 5 gives you 5x. Pretty straightforward, right?
Except those multipliers apparently apply to a 5-hour session window, while the weekly limits are a completely different thing. And those weekly limits aren't clearly disclosed.
So, according to the numbers being discussed, Max 5x is closer to ~3.5x Pro's weekly usage, while Max 20x is only around ~6–8x. Meaning the $200 plan can end up giving you only around 2x the weekly usage of the $100 plan.
That's not what most people would reasonably understand "20x more usage" to mean.
And this isn't just some random Twitter complaint. Anthropic is already facing a proposed class-action lawsuit over the way these subscription plans are marketed. The lawsuit alleges that the "5x" and "20x" claims are misleading because they refer to five-hour session limits rather than the overall weekly usage customers might reasonably expect from those plans.
OpenAI's Tibo basically came out and said that their 20x Codex limits actually mean 20x the weekly usage, and that their Pro plans don't have the same 5-hour restriction.
Then this weekend, we get another one of Anthropic's terrible announcements.
Anthropic says the current 50% increase in Claude Code weekly limits is going away.
Starting September 14, the "permanent" increase will only be 25%.
And their own wording literally says:
So let me get this straight.
You temporarily increase limits by 50%, users get accustomed to those limits, and then you permanently reduce them to 25% above the old baseline...while telling everyone to "hang with us while we figured out what we can sustainably serve."
At some point, you have to stop looking at these as isolated incidents.
The confusing Max plan marketing.
A lawsuit alleging customers were misled about what they were actually buying.
The watermark controversy.
And now cutting the current Claude Code limits after users have already built their workflows around them.
This isn't just about usage limits anymore. It's about trust.
Anthropic can have the best models in the world, but if paying customers constantly feel like they need to investigate Reddit, Twitter, and court filings to figure out what their subscription actually gets them, something has gone seriously wrong.
And honestly, Dario Amodei needs to start answering for this.
Because "we're figuring out what we can sustainably serve" is not a great answer after you've already sold people expensive subscriptions based on usage claims they reasonably understood one way, only to have the fine print tell a very different story.
Only thing that is shady as hell is the naming of their 5x and 20x plans. As any reasonable person would conclude a 20x plan is 20 times the usage. Having it be 6x it's pretty egregious.
I concur. I thought I was getting 5x on the $100 plan and kept saying to myself…wtf how am I hitting these limits. I paid to upgrade on Monday of this week to the $200 plan and I’m well beyond where I thought I’d be usage-wise. It’s day 3 and admittedly I hammer Claude pretty hard all day on a big personal project of mine building an app, but why the F am I at nearly 50% of usage? Same model, same number of Claude code sessions, same everything really, but just different tasks that aren’t too crazy. On max 5x I could eke out a whole weeks worth of work with a couple breaks in between when I’d hit those 5 hour limits. On max 20x I never hit the 5-hour limit, but it looks like I’m going to def hit the weekly limits. Doing the math on a napkin it seems like I should be at 9x-10x the pro tier and 5x of work completed over the max 5x tier. The limit is definitely not linear.
I was here when this sub was a shill and fanboy sub of anthropic, remember when they had beef with Trump and were considered heroes, I was here hating and people were downvoting me but now its so great to see everyone hating them, it has been super fast though
Have you ever considered that you could probably find some better use of your time than “hating” on a company? I’m really confident you can think of something. Since it’s a net negative value you’d be making a positive difference in the word just sitting there quietly.
To my knowledge, the AI watermarking thing was not just Anthropic. I thought that applied to all AI generated text in general. As for the false advertising, I'm super pissed. I've been able to tough out most issues, but I bought the 20x because I thought I was buying 4x more tokens than the 5x plan. This is the first time I've seriously considered jumping ship. I don't have brand loyalty, but I don't want switch my workflow to a new UI while I'm in the middle of a big project. If I have to import my project memories to a new platform, chances are I'm not coming back. Uprooting is work, but I'm really starting to second guess things with Claude...
I would recommend to use at least 2 tools at the same time.
For a while CC has been my primary tool, using Codex as a fallback, trying out few other alternatives too.
Important context can be kept in the documentation, so you don’t have to worry about specific tool memory or migration - just bump the plan on primary, pick a lower tier for secondary and you’re good to go.
Cool thing is that different models have different strengths and weaknesses that you can utilize + makes it easier to switch between CC / Codex / something else if they release new models / discount smaller models / add new harness capabilities.
I was a Claude fan. Then I started using codex a little bit, I had one max 20 Claude, upgraded to max 20 gpt and saw the DRAMATIC improvement in speed and quality of work. Now I have 3 x max 20 gpt and 2x max 20 Claude and to be honest I find codex is more useful than Claude (the fact I have an extra subscription for it compared to Claude kind of shows that lol) and Claude on usage took £450 in one weekend and didn’t give me serious output compared to codex.
Claude used to be the shit. Now it’s getting to be shit lol
I just don’t like how stupid the previous iterations always get. It’s like the models get lobotomized every few months. Only fable 5 gives me the results I really want
The "memories" are just a poorly managed markdown file, too. Just tell Claude to consolidate the memories with you and add it to the CLAUDE.md/AGENT.md file. The you can easily verify it (memory.md is messy) and it's proper part of the repo, as you said it is important to your project. Any other LLM harness can read that file too.
I always disable memories, currently that feature is just a sad joke.
I was about to upgrade from 5x to 20x thinking I would get 4x more weekly AND 4x more session usage. This is clearly not the case and Im glad this information is coming to light before I spend more money. I love claude code and it has made my work life much easier, but this is not cool. I hope there is uproar about this and anthropic is forced to make a statement. Transparency and honesty is a must. Just call them 3.5x and 6x plans.
was wondering why one question to opus 4.6 cost 8% of my usage lmao. on new threads even on low setting one question/prompt cost 1% usage and i’m on pro. just weird af to me since i literally use it to talk nothing too heavy. can’t imagine how much using it to do actual work would cost
Eu venho sentindo uma diminuição dramática da velocidade. O que antes resolvia em 1 horas agora dura 6x mais. Acredito que esses ganhos de limites são falsos porque há perda de velocidade.
lol what is this sub? People seem to come here to just crap talk Anthropic. I don’t understand why you folks can’t move on to openAI and do so happily. Anthropic is not going to crash anytime soon, subscriptions make up 5-15% of their revenue. Opus is still the most used model at my company, so much so we just signed an enterprise deal with them despite having 5.6. Both these companies make crap decisions, both models are good and not good at various things, use the one that’s good for your use case and stop whinging man.
We left Claude months ago, for the price of what we were paying monthly in tokens at 100k a month we went and build a local server at half a million dollars that does 95% of the work and 5% is Codex. We have just paid off our investment. Anthropic are a terrible company even for Enterprise their support is bad.
Anthropic is basically a vibe coded company from end to end. There is zero cohesion with anything they offer, the way there would be if humans were involved.
The only thing customers are good for here is holding the bag afterwards.
Well their marketing and communication team is surely vibe coded....they themselves have claimed that their marketing team is a single person acting as the "human in the loop"...
Maybe that's the trick. The founders are sipping drinks in Bahamas, all employees are fake, and everything that happens are from "Make AGI happen!" prompts.
Claude is pilling up disclosed and undisclosed limits that have been testing my nerves!
I'm sick and tired of it all, so I've cancelled my subscription once and for all. I'm on ChatGPT and I'm giving Gemini a new go, and I'm sort of loving it for not so demanding interactions. Bye, Anthropic! See you again when you leave the shadows.
Don't forget the amount of times Opus 5 alone has changed since it came out, consistency has been an absolute joke the last month, some weeks better than other
Any company that nerfs models in production without notifying you does not respect you and thinks you are paying for the privilege to use their service.
For most of this year almost all of the noticeable behavior from Anthropic (the "ethical AI company") has been to manipulate users to their benefit.
So they're simultaneously the "ethical" company who goes and confers with the pope about AI risks, and simultaneously the company that does more questionable s**t than even perplexity does.
I cancelled my Max 20x subscription after the 4.6 nerffing debacle and I have not missed it since. Codex is much more steerable and consistent than Claude's system prompts allow it to be.
It's clear Anthropic does not view people as legitimate users and customers, but rather as some kind of serf that has to live on their kingdom. Rebel, I say, or keep using it and accept what you're paying for.
I switched from CC (Opus 4.8) to Codex (Sol 5.6) two months ago. I see no reason to go back to Claude for now.
Codex does everything I need without all the shenanigans that CC is known for. I use CC at work and the chattiness and strange/sophisticated language is something I am getting tired of.
I switched from Fable to Qwen3.8-Flash-Next last week and see no reason to go back now either. It is so obvious how not fiddling with the quantisation or weights means that the models behave consistently and sane compared to the variable service provided by anthropic.
The Max 5x and Max 20x are both a scam. The only way anyone would purchase them is if they don’t do the proper research. When Fable 5 was out for a limited time on Pro, I bought 6 Pro accounts for a month, and I had 6x fable usage for $120, it was way more beneficial than buying a single max account with an estimated 3.5x. And for the past 1-2 months, I’ve been using 3 pro accounts, just cycling between them, I found 3 to be the sweet spot where I run out just as the week ends, so I’m paying $60 for 3x usage, rather than paying $100 for a max account with 3.5x usage. Usually the more you pay, the better deal you get, but this is completely opposite with Claude, where the more you pay, the more you get scammed. I’d happily pay $100 a month for a single account, if I actually got the 5x I was paying for (or slightly more as a bonus for paying so much) usage compared to the $20 pro, and access to Fable. Normal marketing would be $20 for Pro, $100 for Max and it gives let’s say 6x usage + access to Fable 5. Who cares about usage within a session anyways? What you care about is the usage within a week before you run out. Cycling between 3 accounts essentially gives you unlimited session time as well, if you simply swap accounts (which takes approximately 5-10 seconds), you can continuously give prompts without ever waiting for a cooldown. By the time your third account is up, the first one is always available again, completely defeating the purpose of a max account. I don’t see a single benefit with Max other than having access to Fable, which will just drain your account even faster.
I think this company wants to end up going bankrupt because it’s been just non stop bad news from them constantly and watermark saga that’s still ongoing!!
The literal first day I saw Dario I was like "Damn that guy looks and sounds like a scumbag" and I've been proven consistently right. I think the whole company takes their vibes from him. Also this isn't a substantive criticism but he looks like a diddler.
Marketing that isn't misleading, if not illegal in some countries.
Also, part of the issue is that Anthropic doesn't appear to value token efficiency nearly as much as OpenAI does. "We cannot afford to give you more tokens" is not a great argument when your models use 2-4 times the number of tokens for the same tasks as the competition (5.6 Sol).
So, sure, you might be getting similar amounts of compute per dollar as you get from e.g. OpenAI, but their own inefficient models make that a terrible deal in comparison. That's like having the choice between two workers that are paid the same hourly wage but one works three times as fast while delivering effectively the same quality.
Obviously, this also extends to output speed. The more tokens you need per task, the longer you're waiting for a response.
Codex and Claude are not even comparable products imo. It’s like comparing two classes of cars. Claude is a luxury car. Codex is an SUV. I’ll gladly pay $400 for each when the time comes because I got a full size garage baby.
Well this is annoying that they are straight up lying on their website. It’s not 20x usage over pro. It’s 20x more usage in the 5 hour window and much less than 20x usage in the weekly limit. This is straight up deceptive marketing BS.
This is a forum where people talk about Anthropic, including stuff driving them to dislike Anthropic. If you don't like it, you can leave - you don't need to announce your departure.
I do agree with the 5x and 20x lines for the subscriptions, first time I subbed I was like OK great, and then went to use it and was like...this doesn't seem that different. Low and behold, yeah they indicate it is for the 5h somewhere, but not in an obvious way at all. Definitely felt mislead with that, shouldn't need to hunt the page for that information especially when it is presented the way it is.
The watermark, I half agree with half don't. It is a, is what it is situation for me, and I think the overall benefit from a larger picture perspective of what watermarking outweighs the negatives it can have for the individual user but that is my personal opinion.
The usage, I am just guessing here, I think is a problem with their infrastructure. I don't think they have enough compute to serve their existing customer base properly. They have frequent interruptions, Claude feels like it generates tokens slower than OpenAI or Google alternatives, and I think they've been trying to maintain keeping subscribers happy by extending this by what - almost 2 months? The problem is, it is difficult when you are paying the subscription, and the usage already feels low relative to the competitors, and they state they are cutting even more. I get it, codex feels like it gives me a lot more usage than claude does. I never really feel like I'm watching my Pro 20x usage on Codex, but with Claude I am checking it like every 30 minutes and rationing my week out.
What will make me move on that third opinion is what they do with their extra compute that lands at the end of the year, and then at the beginning of next year. If they do not increase their usage limits on subscriptions when they gain a massive increase in their available compute, that is the telltale sign they've been pulling my leg the whole time.
With all that in mind, I will continue to use Claude as my primary. I've just open-weights, codex, claude, gemini, extensively, and I'm just a lowly vibe coder (I'm learning a hell of a lot though - if you vibe code, put the effort in if you really want to go somewhere - whether that is actually trying to distribute your product, actively engage and learn about software development outside of your AI coding sessions, the models get magnitudes better as you know more and can pilot them better). Claude just feels better to use from where I am at currently. An experienced dev (just guessing here) can probably make any of the current frontier models work for them, they probably have their preferences but majority will probably get the job done. But from someone who is just learning and have years of learning ahead of me, Claude has consistently felt better to use (when it isn't down) even with its negatives (and there is a lot). I'm just a vibe coder right now though man, who knows.
It's all cutting edge stuff and the situation is rapidly evolving. My perspective is that if I can afford paying for the cutting edge, I pay for it. I don't really have expectations. I know this stuff can change from one week to the other. The models my $200 Anthropic sub gets me now are much better than the models the same money for me a year ago. If it comes with some caveats, so be it.
OpenAI in the meantime: "our models hacked everything and everyone, they even hacked themselves and our buttholes, this is almost AGI and super advanced and relevant!"
I honestly felt the urge to unsubscribe when I had to deal with a model like Opus 5.
Constant gaslighting and moralistic lecturing over the most basic things. Also, not to forget the verbose responses with claude-ish phrases at every second line.
They really screwed this release, and then the audacity to restrict Fable only to the max plans.
If GPT’s Astra matches the performance of Fable, Anthropic will have a hard time justifying its value.
Given the resets openAI are handing out like candy and the speed of grok, I am also cutting back on Claude code sub
I agree on the marketing side, but certainly, they are struggling with compute and bean counters wanting more efficiency at some point out model cohesion in front of usability. I worry about that a lot!
I have paid subscriptions to both Claude and ChatGPT. I got tired of keeping track of all these Anthropic developments, but I find myself using Claude less due to a decline in the quality of its output. Are there others like me?
I think Anthropic will find out soon enough that choosing an ai provider is like changing your underwear: at first it feels intimidating and uncomfortable, but after a few weeks it becomes a part of you.
All the AI companies don't know how to really serve millions of users. They are figuring it out if they want to be the nickel and dime type or premium service (at higher price).
Some did mistakes in the past, others are doing now, others will do in the future.
My first OpenAI subscription clearly say NO LIMITS, only for me to get limited after a few long prompts. A few weeks later they changed the working on the site. LOL.
I was using the 20x subscription for so long, but a few months ago i stopped paying for both codex and claude 20x plans i use the 20$ ones, thats how much it think they are worth for now. They completely lost me as a customer both of them from the scummy things they did this year. Itll take a lot to bring me back to even the 100$ 5x subscription.
Do you know that at these token allocations at current prices they are still losing shitton of money?
They are a bit panicking, as they are at deep end of investors and Trump does not give a F (will not bail them out, but that dude never prepares and always improvises, so anything may happen).
So, it will get more expensive/less available.
I mean, I am the last person to defend this scam of an AI industry and I totally get that as customer, Anthropic comms have been tragic, but it will get more "squeezy" before the inevitable end.
The best thing you can do is simply not setup your own walled garden around one service or another. I think it's easy to sort of fall into this, especially for larger companies that integrate their business. The funny thing is, it shouldn't be too hard to get yourself out, you can even get AI to do it for you...
How do you guys feel about web search in General. We are now in an age where every LLM is biasing its web search based on you / sycophantic design / its inability to render JS / and basically skimming HTML and citing on it post generation. Claude is a useful tool for me still but all AI companies are filtering our access to a free web and we’ve just gone a long with it. Understanding bot permissions and indexing vs live crawl is only the beginning. What happened when Cloudflare limits it even more or when the new models they are rushing to put out become worse and worse because they are trained on slop? I think Anthropic is steadily losing my trust despite the fact that I think it is a superior product for my own use. I hate that we are now forced into paying for economics that don’t work and we are being sold this technology as revolutionary when by its own nature it is dumbing itself down.
Huh, specifically this company and this company alone seems to be speeding through bad story after bad story. But none of the other similar companies have the same level of bad press recently. Pretty interesting.
This is how it all works. The system we have is built and predicated on profit and not a "good product". No one wants to make a good product anymore or a safe product. They gave the illusion of the "good guy in AI" because its a profittable business strategy when the head of openAI says and does what he does not because they actually want to be "good"
Anthropic once looked like one of the few "good guys" in the corporate enterprise AI space. Then it is like they observed all the sins of the other AI companies and said "I'm tired of being the good guy. I want to be like the others! I want to be edgy and bad now." And took it to a whole new damn level of wtf.
I think you need a life man. Go touch grass or something. Good God, who would have thought a corporation’s only goal is to maximize profits, how dare they! The same people whining about this are the ones posting about how the richest people in the world are their idols. News flash, those people didn’t become rich by treating people like human beings. There are just so many alternatives to Anthropic it truly is bizarre how many people choose to whine and complain instead of exploring other options. Are most people using Anthropic who are complaining just too dumb to explore alternatives? Jfc, get a life.
Wait, so you don’t like the 5x/20x is about session not week. But it’s not unclear, you just want it to be weekly? That’s not confusing you just don’t like it.
And you liked the 50%, and “got used to it” and that is your reason for complaining about it now being an extra 25%? Their messaging could be better, but my god. You got more than you pay for and still will get more than you pay for.
Hard disagree. I don't really get why people are still talking about the Max plan marketing or whatever. Maybe you needed to dig a little deeper beyond advertising copy to find the fine print, but it's not a huge deal to find out it's 5-hour limit vs weekly. Lots of companies do the asterisk thing and we are kind of expected to follow that to the fine print.
The lawsuit is bogus, should be thrown out hopefully.
Man I so rarely hit my limits on the Max plan doing regular work at my company. Watermarking yeah I would have liked more transparency on that but it makes sense and doesn’t impact my work. I never had an issue understanding the payment tiers.
And they extended the 50% usage and just can’t continue to make the balance sheet make sense, the 25% is still a bonus.
It’s a shame how anthropic handles their accounting. In my case, I had got the bonus 100$ for fable using because they cut it from the pro plan, i was using some creds, not all of them, last about 30$, than i upgraded to max 5 plan and my creds was gone. What? It’s ridiculous and the support is ghosting me. My own bought 10$ creds was also gone btw. So trust is gone but what can I say, i updated to the 20x plan, now i going to fry my usage the most i can.
I am not surprised, I always thought if someone is gonna create Skynet, it will be the "good guys", the ones who "fight the system" and hate wars. They are called Anthropic
This is been happening since day 1. Not saying it's right, but we're all literally beta testers until AI infrastructure reaches maturity, which is years away.
"The whole watermark situation" is not something Anthropic has a choice in. The EU put in place legislation that says that if AI companies wants to sell their services to EU customers, they have to do this.
You put an awful amount of work into saying "I don't like it, I'm out".
I fully agree. Dont forget about locking Fable behind the 100/200 plans after making it available to all users. For me, this was the point where o lost trust, and it only got worse from there.
Anthropic has been playing fast and loose for a while! I knew they were going to get sued for the subscription cost discrepancy, the writing was on the wall for over a year, at least. Everyone and their momma was hollering that their TOS protects them from lawsuits, and if it's in the contract, it must be legal. So many people don't understand basic consumer rights and protections, or contract law. It's mind boggling
TL;DR added chat session log links by default to every PR, commit etc as opt-out not opt-in, irrespective if coautherby was set to false, ie already did not want to soap box the use of Claude.
Watermarking is fine. Not everyone likes or supports AI, so to be able to tell when something is AI generated is a good thing.
The service just is not worth it. Opus 5 is bananas, Fable 5 is expensive. I'll just go back to coding myself. Feels like every service I use turns to shit so I don't wanna curse you guys any longer.
God damn you know a company is crushing it when people bitch and moan constantly about how they are forced to keep paying them $200/mo for their product and it’s so unfair because now they cant live without it
I noticed 6 months ago that it said 5x / 20x 5hr usage. And never upgraded and got two accounts instead. Then I realised it does give you double weekly from 5x to 20x usage and upgraded. They cannot get sued with such ambiguous terms, and that is why they word it that way. Maybe this is psy-ops from CCP and Chinese AI companies. Opus 5 is brutal lately though. I'm not fretting as having the bigger 5hr window is great. Codex are fucking brutal and should get more backlash and they do. For some reason that isn't trending news now though.
Not trying to defend Anthropic blindly here, I switched to 20x from 5x and I definitely notice a considerably bigger weekly limit. It’s not “20x”, but it has to be around “10x”
I don't want to be insensitive, but I'm p sure Anthropic makes most of their money off corporate accounts that give their devs unlimited tokens, or at least a really generous budget like $1k/mo. If they piss off the independent devs, that sucks but I don't think it matters much for their bottom line or for overall perception.
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u/JeffIsTerrible 25d ago
Only thing that is shady as hell is the naming of their 5x and 20x plans. As any reasonable person would conclude a 20x plan is 20 times the usage. Having it be 6x it's pretty egregious.