tl;dr: A federal judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement requiring Anthropic to pay authors roughly $3,000 per book for pirated works used to train its Claude chatbot, covering over 482,000 books. The ruling follows an earlier finding that while training AI on copyrighted books qualifies as fair use, Anthropic illegally obtained the books via pirate sites. It's the largest known copyright recovery in history and the first major settlement among dozens of pending AI copyright lawsuits.