Are the authors claiming copyright over the LLM? My understanding is they were suing Anthropic for using the authors' data in their training product. The court ruled that using the books for training would be fair use, but that piracy is not fair use.

Thus, isn't the settlement essentially Anthropic admitting that they don't really have an effective defense against the piracy claim?

Oh I don't disagree that the authors may have a compelling case — I was just responding to the statistical similarities vs copying argument. Anthropic may have violated the authors rights, but technically that doesn't extend copyright via a "causal link."

The authors can still sue for damages though (and did, and had a strong enough case Anthropic is trying to settle for over a billion dollars).