Anthropic has officially settled a class action case with authors of books it downloaded to train its AI. The price tag is $1.5 billion. A judge gave final approval yesterday. After attorneys fees and other costs, authors will get about $3,000 for each work. This settlement is the first big one, but just one of many lawsuits still pending. Key legal questions about copyright and how AI companies are using human-made content remain unresolved. AI companies say they can use copyrighted works to train their models because of a legal doctrine called fair use. “Some classic examples of fair use might be commentary, criticism, parody,” said Ben Sobel, an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin.Sobel said AI companies have so far been successful with their fair use arguments. “You get a sense of the way the wind is blowing,” Sobel said.Even in the Anthropic case, the presiding judge found its use of copyrighted books to train Claude qualified as fair use. “The underlying legal conclusions are ones that are relatively good for AI firms,” Sobel said.So why settle? Because the judge also found anthropic illegally copied and stored millions of pirated books. “It was a narrow issue,” said James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School. “It was financially very dangerous to Anthropic, so they were highly incentivized to cut a large check.”But Grimmelmann said appeals courts still need to weigh in on the larger question of if and how AI companies can use copyrighted works — and they’ll have plenty of opportunities ahead. Dozens of cases are pending against OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others. “The lawsuits are coming from essentially every sector of human creativity,” Grimmelman said.Newspapers, recording labels, movie studios, and more. AI companies have increasingly been entering into deals to avoid court fights. “I get letters from my publishers asking me to agree to let them license my books … to AI companies,” Grimmelman said.Jane Ginsburg, professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia Law School — who has edited or coauthored 16 books, mostly about copyright and intellectual property — has granted permission. “It's a means of maybe getting the authors something, also having some control over how the the books are used,” Ginsburg said.Although, she said, such licensing deals could eventually work against AI companies, undercutting their fair use claims. After all, she asked, why would these companies need to cut a deal if they’re certain the law is on their side?