[BUG] Abnormal session consumption on Max 5x plan — 17% usage drop on single small prompt, support tickets closed without human response

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

What's Wrong?
I'm a Max 5x subscriber ($100/month) with 2 years of continuous paid history on Anthropic. Over the past several days I have experienced abnormal session-budget consumption that does not match my workload. In one specific instance, a single short prompt consumed approximately 17% of my available session budget — behavior I have never seen in 2 years of usage on this account.
This pattern matches the issue Anthropic publicly acknowledged on r/Anthropic on March 26, 2026, regarding session limits burning faster during peak hours (5am–11am PT), as well as multiple prior reports (e.g., #43257, #31012, #20363, #10832) of Max-tier subscriptions experiencing abnormal consumption or backend synchronization issues.
Account confirmation

<img width="1174" height="573" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c75490d9-58cb-418e-a366-5f15225d8467" />

Plan: Max 5x ($100/month), active
Tenure: ~2 years continuous paid subscription
Confirmation method: claude.ai/upgrade only displays downgrade options (URLs route to /downgrade/pro), confirming the account is recognized as being on a tier above Pro. The page also surfaces the "Need more usage? Continue using Claude after reaching your plan's usage limits, with standard API rates" message — indicating the system itself recognizes the plan is being exhausted.

Reproduction

Log in to Claude Code with active Max 5x subscription during peak hours (which align with business hours in Chile / America/Santiago timezone, GMT-3 — overlapping with the acknowledged 5am–11am PT peak window)
Submit a small prompt (short context, no large file attachments, no agentic multi-file operation)
Observe usage meter

Expected behavior: Small prompts consume a proportionally small fraction of the session budget, consistent with the Max 5x plan's advertised "5x more usage than Pro."
Actual behavior: A single small prompt consumed ~17% of the current session budget. Subsequent prompts continued to drain at a rate inconsistent with both prior account history and the plan's advertised capacity.
Environment

Plan: Max 5x
Region: Chile (Atacama)
Timezone: America/Santiago (GMT-3)
Affected product: Claude Code (terminal CLI)
Model in use: Claude Opus 4.7 (default)

Support history
Multiple support tickets opened describing this behavior. All tickets closed without human response or resolution — only automated replies via the Fin AI agent. This matches the support escalation pattern reported in #43257, #31012, and #20363, where Max-tier customers were unable to obtain human support despite documented active subscriptions.
This is the reason I'm filing here on the public repo: the standard support channel has not surfaced this for engineering visibility.
Impact

Unable to use the Max 5x plan as advertised
Forced toward pay-as-you-go API usage on top of the $100/month flat plan I already pay for
2 years of customer tenure with no prior issues; the change is recent and abrupt
The system itself surfaces the "Need more usage?" pay-as-you-go upsell, which suggests the backend is correctly registering the plan exhaustion but is not flagging the anomalous consumption rate

Asks

Please review session-consumption telemetry on this account for the past 7 days against historical baseline
Please escalate to a human support agent — automated responses have not addressed this
Please confirm whether this account falls within the population affected by the March 26, 2026 peak-hour session-burn issue, or whether a separate prompt-caching / billing-sync bug is involved (as occurred ~1 month prior to that announcement, per public reporting)
Please indicate whether usage credit / session reset is available as remediation, consistent with prior remediations issued by Anthropic in similar circumstances

Account identifier
I will provide my account email and last-4 of payment method privately to whichever Anthropic engineer or support agent picks this up. I am not posting that information publicly.

Filed in good faith by a long-tenured paying customer. I'm not asking for special treatment — just for the plan I pay for to deliver what it's advertised to deliver, and for a human to look at this.

What Should Happen?

.

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

.

Claude Model

None

Is this a regression?

Yes, this worked in a previous version

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

opous 4,7

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

macOS

Terminal/Shell

Terminal.app (macOS)

Additional Information

_No response_