### Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers
On the surface, a $1.5 billion copyright settlement sounds like a monumental win for creators. But for the vast majority of individual writers, the recent news involving Anthropic is a hollow victory, if it’s a victory at all.
While the sum is undeniably massive, it’s a lump settlement that primarily benefits large publishers and rights holders, not the countless individual authors whose works were ingested, without permission or compensation, to train these powerful AI models. It’s a retroactive payment that papered over past transgressions rather than establishing a clear, sustainable, and equitable licensing framework for the future.
This kind of settlement risks setting a dangerous precedent. It effectively legitimizes the wholesale scraping of copyrighted material for commercial AI development, offering a one-time payout that fails to truly value the ongoing intellectual labor and creative output of individual artists. It doesn’t put control back in the hands of creators, nor does it guarantee them a fair share of the immense profits generated from their stolen work.
For writers struggling in an already challenging industry, the Anthropic deal feels less like justice and more like a corporate workaround, where a huge sum settles a dispute among giants, leaving the actual creators out in the cold. It underscores the urgent need for robust legislation that protects individual artists’ rights and ensures they are fairly compensated in the age of generative AI, rather than just being an unacknowledged data point in a billion-dollar negotiation.