Anthropic Faces Potentially “Business-Ending” Copyright Lawsuit – the judge has signaled he won’t let technicalities slow things down

Submission statement: “Why the other companies should be nervous

If Anthropic settles, it could end up as the only AI company forced to pay for mass copyright infringement — especially if judges in other cases follow Meta’s preferred approach and treat downloading and training as a single act that qualifies as fair use.

For now, Anthropic’s best shot is to win on appeal and convince a higher court to reject Judge Alsup’s reasoning in favor of the more company-friendly [approach](https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-district-judges-rule-using-books-train-ai-fair-use) taken in the Meta case, which treats the act of training as fair use and effectively rolls the infringing downloads into that single use.

But appeals usually have to wait until after a jury trial — so the company faces a brutal choice: settle for potentially billions, or risk a catastrophic damages award and years of uncertainty. If Anthropic goes to trial and loses on appeal, the resulting precedent could drag Meta, OpenAI, and possibly even Google into similar liability.”