Anthropic has to pay $1.5 billion to book authors, the largest copyright settlement in class action history. But the payout is for downloading roughly 482,460 works from piracy databases, not for AI training itself. Judge Alsup had previously ruled that AI training on legally obtained books is "transformative" and falls under fair use. The settlement is actually a win for AI labs.

The dispute is one of several in which copyright holders have sued AI companies over how they have trained their large language models (LLMs).

The final approval settles one case, but it doesn't resolve the broader issue of using copyrighted works to train AI models.