They were not "harshly punished". As always, they get slap on the wrist, proceed to benefit from the crime and that is it. You and I would be harshly punished. Anthropic was not.
1.5 billion dollars are not a "slap on the wrist". That's a huge amount of money. It exceeded the amount they would have legally paid for those books by orders of magnitude.
> 1.5 billion dollars are not a "slap on the wrist".
It is when the wrist being slapped raised $30 billion and had a valuation $380 billion[0] in the month of February 2026. Some would call the $1.5 billion piracy settlement "cost of doing business." And they would be right in this case.
> It exceeded the amount they would have legally paid for those books by orders of magnitude.
Making the argument that a piracy settlement exceeds what a corporation would have paid for each individual book pirated, when said distribution exceeds individual copies of each book "by orders of magnitude" (your words, not mine) is disingenuous at best.
