TechCrunch45%
Anthropic’s landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved 72%
By Kirsten Korosec30%
7/21/2026, 12:12:24 AM
Topics: AI Copyright Lawsuits, AI Training Data
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Recency Bias, and Biased Writer Voice, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 25.6% saturation with 95 hits. Analysis detected 731 faulty-reasoning hits from 371 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 64.8% and a BS Rank of 72% (5,924 of 21,168 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 72.00% of the article peer group.
Anthropic can finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers that sued the AI lab over copyright infringement.
A federal judge gave final approval Monday of Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, Reuters reported.
Alsup has since retired and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement on Monday.
The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them.
While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, many authors and creators still don’t view it as a win.
That’s because of how the legal question was resolved.
Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue.
He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use — a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry.
But the ruling didn’t excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place.
Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.
While the final approval closes out this case, it doesn’t settle the legal question industry-wide because Alsup's ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic's decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.
Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts, which is exactly what's playing out elsewhere.
There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it’s legal to train AI models on copyrighted works.
Just last week, a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class action lawsuit against Google over accusations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.
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Analysis
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