Policy & Regulation

A federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of a class-action copyright lawsuit, with payouts working out to roughly $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 books and other texts. It's believed to be the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, though several authors and publishers say the number still undervalues what was used to train Claude. The approval likely sets a reference price other AI labs facing similar suits will have to reckon with.

Apple has filed a trade secrets lawsuit accusing OpenAI of a pattern of trying to get current and former Apple employees to hand over confidential information, reportedly tied to OpenAI's own hardware push. The timing is notable — OpenAI has been building out consumer devices alongside its software business. If the suit drags on, it could slow hiring and product timelines for whatever OpenAI is building next.

A group of publishers and authors — including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and novelist Scott Turow — filed a class action against Google, alleging its Gemini models were trained on their copyrighted books and that Google altered or removed copyright information to obscure the sourcing. It's the latest in a growing docket of training-data suits against major labs, following Anthropic's recent settlement. The size and profile of the plaintiff group suggests Google is unlikely to settle quietly or quickly.

The New York Times and the Daily News allege OpenAI misrepresented its ability to search its own chat logs and training data for their copyrighted material, escalating a two-year-old lawsuit over whether ChatGPT was trained on and reproduces Times journalism. The claim, if substantiated, could affect how much of OpenAI's internal data practices get exposed during discovery. It lands the same week Anthropic's own copyright case reached a $1.5 billion resolution, raising the stakes on how this one gets settled.