Welcome to the Tech Brew Right Home for Monday, September 8th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors of books that might have trained their AI. Would my book qualify for some of that money? Also, why this is an interesting thing in general. Also, Open AI is making a movie,

tokenizing the stock market, three interesting raises, and at the end of the show, let me tell you

about my weekend experiment with AI. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Well, this would be one of the reasons they raised all that money recently, I guess.

Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion plus interest to resolve an author's copyright lawsuit

over the company's downloading of millions of pirated books, quoting Bloomberg.

A request for preliminary approval of the accord involving one of the fastest

growing AI startups was filed Friday with a San Francisco federal judge who had set the closely

watched case for trial in December. The settlement is among the first in dozens of copyright

lawsuits filed against AI leaders, including OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Mid-Journey,

and alleging misuse of proprietary online content.

Anthropic had said in a court filing that it felt, quote, inordinate pressure to cut a deal to

avoid a potentially business-ending trial that could have put the company on the hook for as much as

$1 trillion in damages. The startup recently reached $5 billion in terms of run rate revenue

and raised $13 billion in investment at a $183 billion valuation. But Anthropic is still

ultimately unprofitable due to the high cost of developing AI. A lawyer representing the plaintiffs

said the accord, quote, far surpasses any other known copyright recovery.

This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted

works from these pirate websites is wrong. Justin Nelson of Sussman Godfrey said in a statement,

the case was brought as a class action on behalf of the authors of as many as 7 million books

who claimed that the startup illegally used downloaded pirated versions of their copyrighted

texts to train its large language AI models, even though it was unclear whether those

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