Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training.

It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.

Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

Paying $3,000 for pirating a ~$30 book seems disproportionate.

With the per-item limit for "willful infringement" being $150,000, it's a bargain.