A U.S. federal court has officially allowed a major copyright infringement lawsuit against Cohere Inc., the Canadian artificial intelligence startup valued at over $5 billion, to proceed to trial. The lawsuit, spearheaded by fourteen leading publishers—including Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Guardian—centers on allegations that Cohere unlawfully used over 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI models, resulting in widespread reproduction and distribution of proprietary publisher content across its commercial platforms.
The Lawsuit and Its Plaintiffs
Filed in February 2025, the lawsuit brings together 14 leading publishers, including Condé Nast, Forbes Media, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Toronto Star, McClatchy, Los Angeles Times, Vox, Politico, and others. The group alleges that Cohere engaged in widespread copyright and trademark infringement by systematically scraping and reproducing thousands of their articles to train its AI models and generate competing “substitutive summaries” without authorization or compensation. The publishers are seeking damages that could…
amount to $150,000 for every article unlawfully reproduced, distributed, or displayed.
Court’s Ruling and Reasoning On November 13, 2025, Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York denied Cohere’s motion to dismiss the case, rejecting arguments that its AI model simply repurposed “abstracted facts.” Instead, the court found credible evidence of direct copying, with Cohere’s Command AI model allegedly copying and pasting entire paragraphs verbatim from publisher content.
The judge also recognized sufficient grounds on several fronts: Direct copyright infringement from both training and output activities, Secondary liability for alleged inducement of infringement, Trademark infringement resulting from AI-generated outputs falsely attributed to publishers, Misuse of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to extract and reproduce articles in real-time, Continued unauthorized use despite “do-not-crawl” instructions, website copyright notices, and cease-and-desist letters from publishers.
The decision called Cohere’s arguments “without merit” and described the allegations of systemic infringement as warranting full legal review. Danielle Coffey, President and…
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