A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be—but it still focuses the mind. At least it did for me when I heard that the AI company Anthropic agreed to an at least $1.5 billion settlement for authors and publishers whose books were used to train an early version of its large language model, Claude. This came after a judge issued a summary judgement that it had pirated the books it used. The proposed agreement—which is still under scrutiny by the wary judge—would reportedly grant authors a minimum $3,000 per book. I’ve written eight and my wife has notched five. We are talking bathroom-renovation dollars here!

Since the settlement is based on pirated books, it doesn’t really address the big issue of whether it’s OK for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted works. But it’s

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