A Cynical Read on Anthropic's Book Settlement

There I was, just sitting there enjoying life when I got the push notification that Anthropic had settled their case with book publishers over potential copyright infringement related to the downloading of books used to train their models. Good on them, I thought. Despite seemingly everyone else doing this, and despite winning a related case, they knew they were in the wrong and were taking the high road. What was the settlement amount? Maybe a few million? Maybe $50 million?

I'm sorry, what?

$1.5 billion. With a 'b'. And not for "book".

Holy shit that's a lot of money. Sure, if Anthropic lost such a case they could have been liable for more money. Maybe a trillion dollars! But come on, we've all seen this story before. Copyright holders sue a new tech player and say their violations are worth trillions. And then they settle for a fraction of that. This fraction is decidedly higher than those other fractions.

And that's especially true since, again, Anthropic was hardly the only one doing such infringing. And so you can't help but wonder if that's not what's really behind this. As cynical as it sounds, is Anthropic eliminating would-be competitors with this move? I mean, am I crazy?

I'm not so sure I am. At $1.5B, there are only a handful of companies that could afford to pay such fines. Certainly OpenAI is one. And of course all the tech giants like Google and Meta. But could any other model-training startup? Probably not.

Holy shit did Dario Amodei just pull a Michael Corleone-like elimination-of-enemies move overnight? Was this something he learned from Elon Musk? Oh, OpenAI wants to convert into a for-profit? Let's set a new floor price on that. Dario just set a floor price on AI training infringement!

Speaking of, this is also a message to all competitors: hey, you gotta pay.

I'm watching a lot of journalists and writers seem almost euphoric at the news. How much is my work worth?! Again, not so fast. This move may actually jolt the market in a bad way, by taking out would-be competitors for your words.

Anthropic says it's settling because they didn't want to risk having to spend trillions. But they may have had to spend that regardless if the AI Wars continue as they have been. With this move, Anthropic may have just narrowed that field.