It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.

Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work.

2. Destruction of Datasets: Anthropic has committed to destroying the datasets it acquired from LibGen and PiLiMi, subject to any legal preservation requirements.

3. Limited Release of Claims: The settlement releases Anthropic only from past claims of infringement related to the works on the official "Works List" up to August 25, 2025. It does not cover any potential future infringements or any claims, past or future, related to infringing outputs generated by Anthropic's AI models.

You can search LibGen by author to see if your work is included. I believe this would make you a member of the class: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc...

If you are a member of the class (or think you are) you can submit your contact information to the plaintiff's attorneys here: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.

By extension, if the big publishers are getting $3000 per article, that could be a fairly significant windfall.

Try to do that. There is no easy way to delete your account. You need to reach out to their support via email. Incredibly obnoxious dark pattern. I hate OpenAI, but everything with Anthropic also smells fishy.

We need more and better players. I hope that XAi will give them all some good competition, but I have my doubts.

It’s not precedent setting but surely it’ll have an impact.

Also if there is a software library with annoying Stallman-style license, can one use LLM to generate a compatible library but in a public domain or with commercial license? So that nobody needs to respect software licenses anymore? Can we also generate a free Photoshop, Linux kernel and Windows this way?

Is there a way to make your content on the web "licensed" in a way where it is only free for human consumption?

I.e. effectively making the use of AI crawlers pirating, thus subject to the same kind of penalties here?

Even might AI with billions must kneel to copyright industry. We are forever doomed. Human culture will never be free from the grasp of rent seeking.

That could push the industry toward consolidation—fewer independent experiments, more centralized R&D inside big tech. I feel that, this might slow the pace of unexpected innovations and increase dependence on incumbents.

This def. raises the question: how do we balance fair compensation for creators with keeping the door open for innovation?

OpenAI and Google will follow soon now that the precedent has been set, and will likely pay more.

It will be a net win for Anthropic.

TBH I'm just going to plow all that money back into Anthropic... might was well cut out the middleman.

Seriously, how will this money propagate to the authors (if at all) or will it just stay with the publishers?

But then, the countries with the freedom to add everything to the training dataset will have to distribute for free the weights in PI walled countries (because they would be plain 'illegal' and will be "blocked" over there, unless free as in free beer I guess), basically only what deepseek could work.

If powerfull LLM hardware becomes somewhat affordable (look at nvidia omega push on LLM specific hardware), "local" companies may run at reasonable speed those 'foreign trained LLM models', but "here".

Sounds harsh, if true. Making its use practical only for hobby projects basically where the results of Claude kept for yourself completely (be it information, product using Claude, or product is made by using Claude). Difficult to believe, I hope I heard it wrong.

Unless, of course, the transformation malfunctioned and you got the good old verbatim source, with many of examples compiled in similar lawsuits

Taken right from the VC's handbook.

It would take time, sure, to compile the lists and make bulk orders, but wouldn't it be cheaper in the end than the settlement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansi_K%C3%BCrsch

I'm not sure if he even knows, but that is almost certainly his tracks they trained on.

They pay out (relative) chump change as a penalty for explicitly pirating a bunch of ebooks, and in return they get a ruling that they can train on copyrighted works forever, for the purchase price of the book (not the price that would be needed to secure the rights!)

A judge making on a ruling based on his opinion of how transformative a technology will be doesn't inspire confidence. There's an equivocation on the word "transformative" here -- not just transformative in the fair use sense, but transformative as in world-changing, impactful, revolutionary. The latter shouldn't matter in a case like this.

> Companies and individuals who willfully infringe on copyright can face significantly higher damages — up to $150,000 per work

Settling for 2% is a steal.

> In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on A.I. development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training A.I. models constitutes fair use,” Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, said in a statement.

This is the highest-order bit, not the $1.5B in settlement. Anthropic's guilty of pirating.

It has been admitted and Anthropic knew that this trial would totally bankrupt them had they said they were innocent and continued to fight the case.

But of course, there's too much money on the line, which means even though Anthropic settled (admitting guilt and profiting off of pirated books) they (Anthropic) knew there was no way they could win that case, and was not worth taking that risk.

> The pivotal fair-use question is still being debated in other AI copyright cases. Another San Francisco judge hearing a similar ongoing lawsuit against Meta ruled shortly after Alsup's decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in "many circumstances."

The first of many.

I haven't had this in a while, but I always hate it when I'm blocked by Cloudflare/Datadome/etc.

We are entering a world which is filled with corporate mafia that is above law (due to insignificant damage it can cause). These mafia would grip the world providing the essential services that make up the future world. The State would become much weaker, as policy makers could be bought by lobbying, punishments can be offset by VC funding.

It is all part of the playbook.

At least if you're a regular citizen.

Thats a weird way for Anthropic to announce they're going out of business.

Imagine going to 500k publishers to buy it individually. 3k per book is way cheaper. The copyright system is turning into a data marketplace in front of our eyes

In March, they were worth $61.5 billion

In six months they've created $120 billion in value. That's almost 700 million dollars per day. Avoiding being slowed down by even a few days is worth a billion dollar payout when you are on this trajectory. This lawsuit, and any lawsuit AI model companies are likely to get, will be a rounding error at the end of the fiscal year.

They know that superintelligent AI is far larger than money, and even so, the money they'll make on the way there is hefty enough for copyright law to not be an issue.

Same racket the media cartels and patent trolls have been forcing for 40-50 years.

What a formidable moat against newcomers, definitely worth the price!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdtBgB7iS8c

Somehow excuses like "we torrented it, but we configured low seeding" "temptation was too strong because there was money to be made" "we tried getting a licenses, but then ignored it" and more ludicrous excuses actually worked.

Internal meta emails seemed to point to people knowing the blatant breach of copyright, and yet Meta won the case.

I guess there are tiers of laws even between billionaire companies.

It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation -- a valuation utterly dependent on all the hoovering up of others' copyrighted works.

AFAICT, if this settlement signals that the typical AI foundation model company's massive-scale commercial theft doesn't result in judgments that wipe out a company (and its execs), then we have confirmation that is a free-for-all for all the other AI gold rush companies.

Then making deals to license rights, in sell-it-to-us-or-we'll-just-take-it-anyway deals, becomes only a routine and optional corporate cost reduction exercise, but not anything the execs will lose sleep over if it's inconvenient.

Because it turns out that nobody in the whole safety cult cares a whit for the human mind, the human experience, human art. Maybe for something they call "human values" in some abstract thought experiment, but never for any human decency. No, the human mind is just ones and zeros, just like a computer, no soul and no spark, to people in the cult. The cult thinks that an LLM reading a book is just the same mechanically as a human reading it.

Your brain is just emergence, your honor. Fair use. Blah blah Dennett Hofstadter Yudkowsky.

Do you feel safe?

Also passing on the cost to consumers of generated content since companies now would need to pay royalties on the back-end should also likely increase the cost of generating slop and hopefully push back against that trend.

This shouldn't just be books, but all written content, like scholarly journals and essays, news articles and blogs, etc.

I realize this is just wishful thinking, but there's got to be some nugget of aspirational desire to pay it forward.

Book authors may see some settlement checks down the line. So might newspapers and other parties that can organize and throw enough $$$ at the problem. But I'll eat my hat if your average blogger ever sees a single cent.