Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by authors. The authors claimed Anthropic illegally used their copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence without permission. If approved by US District Judge William Alsup, this would be the largest copyright settlement in history and marks a turning point for how AI companies handle creative content.

At approximately $3,000 per book, plus interest, Anthropic has not only agreed to compensate authors but has also committed to destroying the datasets containing their copyrighted works. This isn't merely a financial transaction; it's an acknowledgment that the Silicon Valley mantra of "move fast and break things" has finally encountered an immovable object in copyright law.

Anthropic's settlement is just the tip of the iceberg in what has become a comprehensive legal assault on AI companies' training practices. The landscape is littered with similar lawsuits: authors Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others have ongoing cases against OpenAI and Meta, news organisations have sued companies over unauthorised use of their articles, and visual artists have filed suits against Stability AI, Midjourney, and other image-generation platforms. Approximately a dozen major lawsuits have been filed across California and New York courts, collectively representing the most significant challenge to AI development practices since the technology's emergence.