A US judge just approved Anthropic's $1.5B payout to authors whose books trained Claude.
It is the largest known settlement in any US copyright case.
The fight started when writers sued the company for grabbing pirated copies of their books.
Those stolen texts were fed in to teach the model how to answer prompts.
A judge ruled that training on books is fair use， so that part stayed legal.
But the same judge flagged a separate problem， one unrelated to training.
The company had saved over 7 million pirated books into a central library it barely used.
Storing stolen copies is infringement on its own， even without any training.
That exposure was huge， since a trial could have pushed damages into the hundreds of billions.
So both sides settled， and 91% of covered authors have already claimed their share.
Some writers pushed back， calling the sum too small and the fees too fat.
he judge said that complaints about the settlement's size were "not grounded in a realistic assessment of the overall risks and rewards of a trial，"
A few opted out and are still chasing their own cases against the company.
Paying $1.5B to protect a fair use win looks cheap for Anthropic.