Anthropic Pirated 500,000 Books and Settled for $3,000 Apiece

Anthropic, the lab that sells itself as the safety-conscious grownup of the AI business, got caught training Claude on hundreds of thousands of books it pulled straight from pirate libraries like Library Genesis. Rather than face a jury, it agreed to pay roughly $1.5 billion, about $3,000 for each of the half-million works, in what court watchers call the largest copyright settlement in American history. The judge let the model training itself stand as fair use, so the bill is purely for the stealing, a billion-dollar receipt for skipping the checkout line. Your f*ucking AI read the entire library, pocketed the free version, and the late fee finally came due. Read Courthouse News Service on the $1.5 billion settlement.