The Event: September 2025 marked a turning point in the “AI vs. Creators” war. Anthropic, the AI startup behind the ‘Claude’ models, agreed to a massive $1.5 billion settlement with a class of authors and publishers. The lawsuit alleged that Anthropic used pirated versions of copyrighted books—sourced from “shadow library” datasets—to train its models without license or payment.

Simultaneously, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster filed a new lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the search engine of scraping their content to generate summaries that effectively compete with the original sources.

Why This Matters: This is the first time a major AI lab has paid out a settlement of this magnitude. It signals that the “Fair Use” defense for training data is cracking under legal pressure. For businesses using AI tools, this raises critical questions about the “IP hygiene” of the models they rely on.

How ASEAN IPR Helps: Are you using AI tools to generate marketing copy or code? If the underlying model is sued for infringement, your output could theoretically be at risk. ASEAN IPR advises companies on “AI Risk Mitigation.” We review your vendor contracts and indemnify clauses to ensure your business is insulated from the upstream copyright battles of Big Tech.