Last week, Anthropic, the parent company of Claude, agreed to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion in damages for stealing their stuff. But the judge in the case said the robots worked within fair use in copying the works of some 500,000 authors and only went afoul of the law when they did so from pirate sites that make books available online without paying for them. The agreement works out to about three grand per author. Not exactly life-changing, and not even a speed bump for a company that worth almost $200 billion.
It is, however, maybe the first in a court battle royal between the robots and human writers. We’ll see.
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