A Claude user says his usage drained from 0 to 100% while he wasn't using it

AI horror story of the day, from r/ClaudeAI: his usage went from 0 to 100 percent in half an hour while he was not using Claude at all.

The account

The user says he woke up to two Anthropic invoices, one for a Max 20x subscription and one for auto-recharge extra usage, on a plan he writes he “never knowingly signed up for.”

Then came the part that turned a billing complaint into a mystery. He watched the meter climb while doing nothing: 11 percent at 11:09, 47 percent at 11:20, 100 percent at 11:40. His settings showed no active session, and in his words, Claude Code reported “No Claude Code instance connected.”

Digging further, he found the spending limit set to what he calls an absurd 2,000 euros, and says he has contacted support by chat and email without a human reply yet.

The context around the complaint

Two framing points keep this story honest. First, this is one user’s account, and it has not been confirmed by Anthropic. Screenshots of a climbing meter are compelling, but they are still a single side of a support ticket.

Second, the complaint does not arrive in a vacuum. Anthropic is already facing a proposed federal lawsuit in the Northern District of California over how Max 5x and Max 20x usage limits were marketed. Individual billing stories carry more weight when they rhyme with an active legal question about the same product tier.

The ten-second check

Whatever the resolution of this particular case, the practical takeaway costs almost nothing: if you are on a Max plan, checking your spending cap takes ten seconds. A limit you did not set, or one set far above what you would ever intend to spend, is exactly the kind of quiet default that turns a glitch into an invoice.

Subscription AI tools now sit in the same category as cloud bills: worth a periodic look at the meter, even when you are sure nothing is running.