Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement
Published on 7 September 2025
Totally fair use right, Anthropic?
Anthropic, the 'ethical' B Corp, just settled a lawsuit for $1.5 billion after being caught pirating books to train its Claude LLM. So much for being the good guys.
Back in June, I wrote about the ongoing lawsuit Anthropic was facing from Reddit for aggressive data scraping. It seems that for this B Corp white knight, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Things have taken a nosedive for them this year, because Anthropic now has to pay $1.5 billion for straight-up PIRATING BOOKS to train their LLM, Claude.
You heard that right. Not just scraping, but knowingly using stolen material from shadow libraries like Library Genesis. This is the kind of behaviour you'd expect from a company like Facebook, not a supposed Public Benefit Corporation whose entire image is built on being legal, helpful, and pro-consumer. Scraping websites against their owners' wishes is one thing, but this is a clear escalation to deliberate theft.
And like I said before, this isn't a one-off incident. Anthropic has been doing this for years.
Even when caught red-handed, their spokespeople issue the same tone-deaf, corporate-braindead statements about how they are "committed to developing safe and beneficial systems." How can you claim that with a straight face while your lawyers are settling a billion-dollar lawsuit for theft?
Let's be clear. In the current genai bubble, where every single LLM maker is burning through cash without turning a profit, that $1.5 billion isn't coming from some rainy-day fund. This is raw investment capital, the same multi-billion-dollar rounds fronted by Amazon and Google, being funneled directly into paying a fine for piracy. All that cash that was supposed to be spent on securing thousands of next-gen Nvidia GPUs, paying the massive electricity bills to keep the models running, and funding the absurd salaries for researchers is instead being incinerated to clean up their own stupidity. This was a completely avoidable, self-inflicted wound.
✅ The Verdict
You know what an actual B Corp with a shred of integrity would have done? Worked out licensing deals with the authors and publishers from day one. An agreement like that would have been far cheaper, positioning them as an ethical leader and generating incredible PR. You know, the exact thing your ENTIRE COMPANY IMAGE IS SUPPOSED TO BE BASED ON. Instead, they chose theft, and now their investors get to foot the bill for the largest copyright settlement in history.
Remember this: a billion-dollar company does not care about ethics, safety, or you. It cares about its investors' pockets. And as Anthropic has now proven, the ones who virtue signal the loudest are often the worst of the bunch.