14 publishers sue Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement

Fourteen news and magazine publishers — including Condé Nast, Forbes, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, Vox Media and McClatchy, under the lead plaintiff Advance Local Media — sued the Canadian AI company Cohere in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleged that Cohere’s Command family of models had been trained on and could reproduce substantial portions of the publishers’ copyrighted articles, sometimes near-verbatim, in some cases bypassing paywalls; it cited more than 4,000 allegedly infringed works and included around 75 example outputs the publishers said tracked the structure, sequencing and wording of specific articles.

The suit added a claim less common in the wave of AI copyright litigation: trademark infringement, arguing that when Cohere’s models generated fabricated content and falsely attributed it to the publishers’ mastheads — a form of hallucination — this constituted use of their trademarks in a way likely to cause confusion about the source of the material. Statutory copyright damages in US law can reach up to $150,000 per work found to be wilfully infringed, which on the complaint’s count of works would represent a very large potential exposure, though such a figure is a ceiling on what a court could award rather than a claimed or reported sum.

The case joined a large and growing docket of publisher suits against AI developers — commentary at the time counted it as roughly the 39th such US copyright action — and was among the first to target Cohere specifically, a company that had positioned itself as an enterprise-focused alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic. A court later allowed most of the publishers’ claims to proceed past Cohere’s motion to dismiss.