Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors, in a settlement approved by a US judge. It might sound like a devastating blow. But does that mean creatives are winning the fight against AI? I'm not sure.
The first thing is that, legally speaking, this wasn't a verdict on whether AI was allowed to read these books and learn from them. That remains perfectly legal, after Judge William Alsup ruled last year that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as 'fair use'.
Instead, the thing Anthropic is being fined for is downloading millions of books (including my own) from pirate sites such as Library Genesis, rather than buying them. The ruling doesn't say AI companies need permission to train on your work. It simply says they need a receipt.
Do the maths
Even the fine itself isn't as significant as it looks. Yes, $1.5 billion is an enormous sum. But it's basically loose change to a company valued in May at $965 billion. By my maths, that makes the fine less than 0.2% of Anthropic's worth: the corporate equivalent of losing a fiver down the sofa. Irritating, sure, but not game-changing.
The per-author breakdown is more depressing still. The settlement covers around 500,000 works, with eligible authors and publishers claiming roughly $3,000 per pirated book. US law technically allows damages of up to $150,000 per work in cases of wilful infringement, so authors are getting about 2% of the theoretical maximum.
That'll still be a useful cheque to many, and 91% of the roughly 440,000 eligible claimants have already taken it. But "largest copyright recovery in history" and "significant win for creatives" are two different things, and mainstream coverage of this case has mostly blurred them together.
Losing sleep
While this wasn't a win for creatives, it's not over for the AI companies either. The settlement doesn't release Anthropic from future claims, or from anything based on what its models actually generate. That's because this case was never really about Claude's output; it was about how Anthropic built its library.
Picture a burglar who smashes a window, climbs into your bedroom and rifles through your underwear drawer. He gets punished for the broken window, and you feel pretty good about that. Then the judge adds a footnote: had he climbed in through an unlocked window instead, the underwear-rifling would have been perfectly legal. You'd still find it hard to sleep at night, wouldn't you?
That's roughly where things stand for creatives. Artists, illustrators, photographers and game developers whose work has been fed into the current generation of AI models have no legal protection, as long as the company doing the feeding has a receipt for the book, print, game or whatever form their work was published in. That's rather less comforting than the "AI company forced to pay authors" headline suggests.
A settlement that won't settle anything
Be aware, too, that this ruling sets no binding precedent. By settling rather than going to trial, Anthropic has ensured the case will never reach an appeals court, the only route to a ruling that would bind other judges. Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI are all fighting their own versions of this dispute, each to be decided on its own facts. Just last week, publishers including Hachette and Cengage filed a fresh suit against Google over Gemini's training data.
So what does the biggest AI copyright payout in history actually change for creatives? Less than the number suggests, I'd say.
It hands a welcome cheque to a few hundred thousand authors, from a company that can absorb the cost without much noticing. It confirms that training AI on your work without permission remains broadly legal, provided the company paid for its content first. And it leaves every other AI company's practices to be litigated separately, from scratch. The war, in short, rumbles on.
