As Anthropic argued, it now “faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months”

Well sure when you potentially violate almost every active copyright for multiple kinds of media, you end up potentially being liable for some wild damages. That’s the whole point.

Whether or not the work was sufficiently transformative will be an interesting question of course, but they should have known up front that this legal battle was a risk that their business could need to face.