AI’s Explosive Weekend: $1.5B Settlement, Record Fines & Game-Changing Breakthroughs (Sept 7–8, 2025)
Key Facts Authors vs. AI: Landmark Settlement and New Copyright Battles After years of tension between creators and AI firms, content owners scored a major victory. Anthropic – maker of the Claude chatbot – agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by authors who accused it of illegally downloading millions of pirated books to train AI reuters.com reuters.com. Plaintiffs say it’s the largest copyright payout in U.S. history reuters.com reuters.com, roughly $3,000 per book for about 500,000 titles. Under the deal, Anthropic will delete all illicit book data taken from shadow libraries and compensate authors for past use