A consortium of fourteen publishers including Condé Nast, The Atlantic, and Forbes have filed a lawsuit against Cohere alleging that the generative AI startup has engaged in “massive, systematic” copyright infringement.
In the complaint, the publisher plaintiffs accuse Cohere of using at least 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI models and display large portions of articles — and even entire articles — for users, harming the publishers’ referral traffic. The suit also alleges that Cohere infringed on publishers’ trademarks by “hallucinating” content that wasn’t actually published by the outlets.
TechCrunch has reached out to Cohere for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
The lawsuit against Cohere is the latest in a string of courtroom battles targeting AI companies for alleged IP violations. Some companies, including OpenAI, have embraced a strategy of licensing content in part to fend off future legal challenges, while at the same time arguing that their alleged use of copyrighted material is fair use.
