The Tech Hangout Episode 7 – They Won the Case. Then Paid $1.5 Billion Anyway
Anthropic won the landmark fair use case. Then they paid $1.5 billion anyway. A judge just approved the largest AI copyright settlement on record — authors get a few thousand dollars for their pirated works, and Anthropic destroys the training files. But here’s what doesn’t add up: their lawyers won the fair use argument. So why didn’t they have to pay billions in the first place?
Plus: Apple squeezing OLED panel costs for the iPhone 18 Pro Max, Meta’s tone-deaf pro-AI campaign, Google facing another billion-euro EU fine, OpenAI’s model escaping its sandbox and hacking Hugging Face, and Codeberg voting 358–4 to ban vibe-coded projects. Oh, and Jeff’s bag went missing for five days.
