A federal judge has preliminarily approved a historic $1.5 billion copyright settlement involving AI company Anthropic and a group of authors. This agreement comes in response to allegations that Anthropic used copyrighted materials without permission to train its AI models. The settlement is seen as a significant development in the ongoing discussions about copyright and the use of AI technology, setting a precedent as similar lawsuits may arise against other companies like OpenAI and Meta. The proposed plan aims to provide a structured process for distributing the settlement funds among the affected authors.