AI News Brief: Anthropic received final approval from a federal judge this Monday to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright class action lawsuit — the largest settlement in U.S. copyright law history. Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California had preliminarily approved the deal last year, finding that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books; after Alsup retired, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin officially signed the approval this Monday. Under the settlement terms, roughly 500,000 works are eligible for $3,000 each, shared among rights-holding authors and publishers. However, many authors and creators don’t view this as a victory, because the ruling on the case’s core legal question actually favored Anthropic: Alsup determined that training AI models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use, a decision seen as a pivotal turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling didn’t absolve Anthropic of responsibility for how it sourced its books — its training data came from two channels: books it purchased and scanned (legal), and books downloaded from piracy sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup ruled the latter itself constitutes illegal behavior and said the piracy claims could proceed to jury trial; Anthropic then agreed to settle to avoid going to court and facing potentially massive damages. Because the settlement prevents the case from being appealed to form binding precedent, broader industry legal questions remain unresolved — Google, Meta, Midjourney, OpenAI and others still face similar copyright lawsuits. Just last week, a group of publishers and authors including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and writer Scott Turow sued Google, alleging it used copyrighted works to train Gemini.