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…
