Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers; TechCrunch, September 5, 2025

Amanda Silberling , TechCrunch; Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers

"But writers aren’t getting this settlement because their work was fed to an AI — this is just a costly slap on the wrist for Anthropic, a company that just raised another $13 billion, because it illegally downloaded books instead of buying them.

In June, federal judge William Alsup sided with Anthropic and ruled that it is, indeed, legal to train AI on copyrighted material. The judge argues that this use case is “transformative” enough to be protected by the fair use doctrine, a carve-out of copyright law that hasn’t been updated since 1976.

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” the judge said.

It was the piracy — not the AI training — that moved Judge Alsup to bring the case to trial, but with Anthropic’s settlement, a trial is no longer necessary."