Thus, I stand to receive about $9,000 as a result of this settlement.
I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. Also, while I'm sure that Anthropic has benefited from training its models on this dataset, that doesn't necessarily mean that those models are a lasting asset.
It remains to be seen, but typically this forms a moat. Other companies can't bring together the investment resources to duplicate the effort and they die.
The only reasons why this wouldn't be a moat:
1. Too many investment dollars and companies chasing the same goal, and none of them consolidate. (Non-consolidation feels impractical.)
2. Open source / commoditize-my-complement offerings that devalue foundation models. We have a few of these, but the best still require H100s and they're not building product.
I think there's a moat. I think Anthropic is well positioned to capitalize from this.