So, as someone who does these sorts of cases for a living, the settlement itself isn’t going to ruin Anthropic. It will be large and uncomfortable, certainly, but it’s going to be a discrete pile of money from which all the claims (and attorneys fees, costs, expenses, and plaintiff service awards)
will come. Lieff Cabraser is going to want as many authors as possible to file claims to be able to tell the court that their claims rate is high, but the more people who file claims, the less each individual claim is likely to be. If you have a $1M fund from which a thousand people file a claim,
Generally each claim would be looked at individually. It may be class action but my guess the individual damages cannot be assessed on a unit basis as all things are not equal, and equal harm isn't a thing in this case.
For a settlement, I assure you that is not the case. The settlement agreement will contain some mechanism by which everyone can file a claim, which will be the responsibility of the claims administrator to decide. It will be done in such a way as to minimize the CA’s work.
it’s a different situation than a $1M fund from which a million people each file a claim. Not everyone will be thrilled with the result, and Anthropic is only going to settle if it means that they can meaningfully continue their business model in some way. So certainly it is good that authors are
going to get money for having their works used without their consent (and without payment), but they will need to actually file claims and be aware that phrases like “up to $X amount” can often come in at a tiny percentage of that if the claims rate is off the charts.