A billion-dollar settlement carries more immediate force than a favorable doctrine, and the Bartz v. Anthropic resolution demonstrates why. The court gave Anthropic a significant win — training on lawfully acquired books is fair use — and Anthropic settled anyway. That sequence is the key interpretive fact for anyone watching AI copyright litigation develop. Anthropic looked at the piracy-sourcing half of its exposure and concluded that a trial loss on that narrower claim, with the full discovery record public, would cost more than $1.5 billion in downstream liability across every…