A US court has ordered AI lab Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to book authors in a class action copyright case. The payment is related to the lab's downloading of nearly 482,000 works from piracy databases, not for training its AI models. This decision is significant because it follows a previous ruling that AI training on legally obtained books is considered fair use. As a result, the settlement is seen as a victory for AI labs, as it establishes a precedent for their use of copyrighted materials in research and development. This development has implications for the future of AI research and its relationship with copyright law.