You're both reading tea leaves.

Settling just says that they expected the internal costs or risks to be more than 1.5 billion cashflow.

  In the $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation they said their run-rate revenue crossed $47B annualised.

With those numbers, there can be sound financial reasons for wanting to just get rid of the lawsuit.

Also if it ends up that other competitors also need to pay $1.5 billion, then maybe that does or doesn't have a competitive advantage.

Anthropic's business and legal strategies are not public. I would expect there to be multiple legs/reasons for settlement even for a decision below 1%. Trying to create a single narrative is what us spectators do.