Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers; TechCrunch, September 5, 2025

Amanda Silberling , TechCrunch; Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers

"But writers aren’t getting this settlement because their work was fed to an AI — this is just a costly slap on the wrist for Anthropic, a company that just raised another $13 billion, because it illegally downloaded books instead of buying them.

In June, federal judge William Alsup sided with Anthropic and ruled that it is, indeed, legal to train AI on copyrighted material. The judge argues that this use case is “transformative” enough to be protected by the fair use doctrine, a carve-out of copyright law that hasn’t been updated since 1976.

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” the judge said.

It was the piracy — not the AI training — that moved Judge Alsup to bring the case to trial, but with Anthropic’s settlement, a trial is no longer necessary."

Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit; NPR, September 5, 2025

 Chloe Veltman , NPR; Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit

"In one of the largest copyright settlements involving generative artificial intelligence, Anthropic AI, a leading company in the generative AI space, has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a group of authors.

If the court approves the settlement, Anthropic will compensate authors around $3,000 for each of the estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.

The settlement, which U.S. Senior District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco will consider approving next week, is in a case that involved the first substantive decision on how fair use applies to generative AI systems. It also suggests an inflection point in the ongoing legal fights between the creative industries and the AI companies accused of illegally using artistic works to train the large language models that underpin their widely-used AI systems.

The fair use doctrine enables copyrighted works to be used by third parties without the copyright holder's consent in some circumstances, such as when illustrating a point in a news article. AI companies trying to make the case for the use of copyrighted works to train their generative AI models commonly invoke fair use. But authors and other creative industry plaintiffs have been pushing back.

"This landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history," the settlement motion states, arguing that it will "provide meaningful compensation" to authors and "set a precedent of AI companies paying for their use of pirated websites."

"This settlement marks the beginning of a necessary evolution toward a legitimate, market-based licensing scheme for training data," said Cecilia Ziniti, a tech industry lawyer and former Ninth Circuit clerk who is not involved in this specific case but has been following it closely. "It's not the end of AI, but the start of a more mature, sustainable ecosystem where creators are compensated, much like how the music industry adapted to digital distribution.""