AI News Page

MACHINE AGE CARTOON

THE 20X SHRINK RAY

By Zimbo · November 8, 2026

AI cartoon by Zimbo: Satirical cartoon: a giant WEEKLY CAP press crushes a dashed 20X into a solid 6X while a stunned subscriber holds a $200 receipt, a Claude Max robot clerk watches, and a judge inspects with a magnifying glass, on plain white paper.
Anthropic sold Claude Max as 20x the usage — then the weekly cap crushed it down to 6x, and a judge is letting the lawsuit proceed.Zimbo for AI News Page

The story behind the cartoon

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled on November 6 that Anthropic must face claims its Claude Max plans promised more than they delivered: Magistrate Judge Alex Tse called the '5x or 20x more usage than Pro' pitch 'plausibly misleading' and let a proposed class action by two subscribers go ahead.

The multipliers hold inside each five-hour session, but the weekly caps do not scale — the plaintiffs calculate Max 5x delivers about 3.5 times Pro's weekly usage and Max 20x about six times — on the $100-a-month Max 5x and $200-a-month Max 20x plans, renamed Max and Ultra on October 30.

The claims survived; nothing was dismissed, and Anthropic will have to argue the pitch in front of a judge.

The joke is the shrink ray: a giant WEEKLY CAP press crushes a dashed 20X down to a solid 6X while the $200 subscriber gapes, the Claude Max clerk looks on, and the judge inspects the press with a magnifying glass.

READ THE FULL REPORT — MadRobot ↗

MORE ZIMBO ↓

Satirical cartoon: a robot in VM 1 peers through a glass XEN wall with a magnifying glass at the MEMORY filing cabinet in VM 2 while the neighboring robot sleeps at its laptop, on plain white paper.THE WALLS ARE MADE OF GLASSSatirical cartoon: a cheerful Claude Code robot ticks a giant YES, AND DON'T ASK AGAIN checkbox while a settings file spills DB passwords, AWS keys, SSH logins and GitHub tokens into a PUBLIC GITHUB bin, on plain white paper.THE PERMISSION SLIPSatirical cartoon: a sweating Anthropic executive pulls a giant black redaction strip across a huge speedometer whose needle has shot past a red 2x WARNING mark, while a cheerful robot behind an open hatch turns the gears, on plain white paper.THE REDACTED SPEEDOMETERSatirical cartoon: a sleeping robot rests its cheek on an open notebook, red pencil in hand, crossing out the wrong PokéCenter location and drawing the corrected map, while a dream cloud shows a pixel trainer at a cliff edge with the PokéCenter crossed out, on plain white paper.THE SLEEPING EDITOR

Sources behind the cartoon

Embed this cartoon

GRAB THE SNIPPET

Free to put on your site. Paste the snippet, keep the credit line, don't mess with the art.

Zimbo

Zimbo draws money, power, artificial intelligence, and whatever else appears to be going terribly well.

Republish this cartoon

Newsletters, blogs, and publications may republish this cartoon free with visible Zimbo / AI News Page credit and a link to this page. Keep the Zimbo signature intact, do not materially alter the artwork, and do not imply endorsement by AI News Page. This permission applies only to this cartoon, not linked source material or other third-party works.