What Anthropic's agreement to pay $1.5 billion to settle an author class action accomplished was not legal clarity — the fair use question remains unresolved in other courts — but rhetorical clarity. For two years, the argument that AI training constituted theft had been met with the counter that no court had confirmed it. That counter is now worth considerably less. Nine-figure settlements do not happen when the legal theory is frivolous, and artist communities understood this faster than legal commentators, who were busy parsing what the settlement did…