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.

To be even more clear - this is a settlement, it does not establish precedent, nor admit wrongdoing. This does not establish that training is fair use, nor that scanning books is fine. That's somebody else's battle.

Right, the settlement doesn't.

However, the judge already ruled on the only important piece of this legal proceeding:

> Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude...