This is not even than a slap on the wrist. Publishers who negotiated this really fucked up writers.

According to US federal law, pirating a single copyrighted work and gaining commercial advantage of it (which Anthropic 100% did) represents five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But it gets worse:

"Penalties for a copyright infringement conviction may increase if the defendant has previous similar convictions, made more than 10 copies of copyrighted works, committed copyright infringement during a period longer than 180 days, or infringed copyrighted material worth more than $2,500."

https://www.justia.com/entertainment-law/piracy-in-the-enter...

Those are the maximum penalties though

It's seemingly $3,000 per book, so they could've (and did, partially) just bought the books themselves for way cheaper, and with only a fraction of that money going to the authors

It's valid to not take AI companies' side here but people who think publishers are fighing for the little guy's rights are delusional. Tech companies have been exploiting artists for a few years, publishers/record labels/media companies have been doing it for centuries.

That is a false statement. Gaining commercial advantage means selling pirated copies which Anthropic absolutely did not do, so none of your following statements are correct either.