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Comment by paddw | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic should drop the deal and take the battle up the court system, they'll probably win

they did, judge told authors to get better representation to prove harm. I think it's dicey cause if anthropic loses then it could be catastrophic (i.e. if judge jury thinks reward is 5x of what the proposal is would mean they would need to raise a new round)

Anthropic having to raise a new round doesn't sound "catastrophic"...

I think the dilution hurts a lot

> they'll probably win

They are settling because the risk of losing will cost their entire business.

Anthropic knows that they will lose if they were brought to trial.

Yeah settling seems good for investors imo. It's variance reduction.

Indeed.

I know little but perhaps the harm felt on future valuation is more than the settlement amount.

It's an indisputable fact they downloaded like 7M books illegally.

From the article:

> Alsup gave the parties a Sept. 15 deadline to submit a final list of works, which currently stands around 465,000.

They did download 7M books.

> That's a far cry from the 7 million works that he initially certified as covered in the class. A breakdown from the Authors Guild—which consulted on the case and is part of a Working Group helping to allocate claims of $3,000 per work to authors and publishers—explained that "after accounting for the many duplicates," foreign editions, unregistered works, and books missing class criteria, "only approximately 500,000 titles meet the definition required to be part of the class."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/judge-anthropics...

They're likely taking the deal because they think there's a good chance they'll lose, and that the final judgement would be more -- possibly a lot more -- than this settlement.

But sure, I bet us randos on HN have a better feel for this than Anthropic's legal team.

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