Major Publishers Sue AI Startup Cohere for Copyright Infringement

Major publishers launch copyright lawsuit against AI startup Cohere - SiliconANGLE

Major publishers launch copyright lawsuit against AI startup Cohere Several major publishers are suing the Canadian artificial intelligence startup Cohere Inc., alleging that the company engaged in "systematic copyright and trademark infringement," the latest in a long line of copyright lawsuits publishers have launched against AI firms. "Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing," said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. "Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands." The group includes Condé Nast, the mass media giant and owner of brands such as Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Pitchfork, Wired and Ars Technica. It was joined by other news behemoths, including The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, the Toronto Star and Vox Media. They claim Cohere, a company valued at more than $5 billion, improperly used more than 4,000 copyrighted works to train its large language model. The company is also accused of replicating large sections of work through its chatbot without properly attributing the sources. Moreover, the lawsuit claims when the chatbot has reproduced content with attribution, there have been "hallucinations" that have resulted in mistakes, tainting the companies that were said to be the source. An example given, which was supposed to be from the Guardian, discussed the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival in Israel but seemed to get this mixed up with the 2020 shootings in Nova Scotia, Canada. The plaintiffs are seeking the maximum under the Copyright Act, which would be $150,000 for every work that has been infringed. The publishers are also asking for a legal precedent to "establish the terms of the playing field for licensed use of journalism for AI, including for training and also real-time uses." In a statement, Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere, said the company "strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI." He added that the lawsuit is "misguided and frivolous" and that Cohere "would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns -- and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach -- rather than learning about them in a filing."

News outlets sue Cohere over alleged copyright infringement

This lawsuit continuous the ongoing battle between AI companies and news publishers surrounding copyright issues. More than a dozen top news publishers, including Forbes, Vox, The Guardian and Politico have filed a joint lawsuit against the Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) company Cohere over allegations of "systematic copyright and trademark infringement". The complaint, which was filed yesterday (13 February) at the Southern District Court of New York by claims that Cohere scrapes copies of published articles, trains its AI models using the data, and in turn, uses the outputs to compete with the outlets it 'stole' the data from. According to the plaintiff's filing, Cohere's AI models deliver full verbatim copies, substantial summaries and publishers' articles protected by paywalls through an interface. Moreover, the lawsuit also alleges that Cohere's AI hallucinates and "blatantly manufactures fake pieces" that it represents as coming from the plaintiffs, misleading the public, while tarnishing the publishers' brand reputation. The Toronto-based AI start-up was founded by Aidan Gomez in 2019 and is valued at more than $5bn. It's backed by Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu, as well as the Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada's export credit agency EDC. Gomez has claimed in interviews that Cohere does not scrape data that it shouldn't scrape. Moreover, he also told The Verge - one of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit against the company - that "we [the company] don't want to be training on stuff that people don't want us training on, full stop". However, the lawsuit alleges that Gomez's claims are false. Responding to the filing, a Cohere spokesperson told news outlets that the company "strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI". "We have long prioritised controls that mitigate the risk of IP [intellectual property] infringement and respect the rights of holders. We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns - and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach - rather than learning about them in a filing." The fresh lawsuit continuous the ongoing battle between AI companies and news publishers who claim their intellectual property is infringed upon by AI models who steal their copyrighted content without permission. Just days ago, Thomson Reuters, a Canadian technology company and the parent company of the Reuters news agency won a partial summary judgement against AI start-up Ross Intelligence in a copyright infringement lawsuit. The judge presiding over the case overturned his previous summary judgement and disallowed the AI company from using 'fair use' as a defense for training models on proprietary data without permission. However, two news outlets Raw Story Media and AlterNet Media lost a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI at the Southern District of New York last year for being unable to prove that ChatGPT caused them "concrete injury". While The New York Times launched a similar legal battle against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 which is still ongoing. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Major publishers sue AI startup Cohere over copyright infringement

Major publishers, including Politico and Vox, and their parent companies are suing the AI startup Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement, . This is another salvo in the ongoing war between the people that make stuff and the AI algorithms that mimic the stuff that people make. The various publishers, which also include The Atlantic and The Guardian, have accused Cohere of improperly using more than 4,000 copyrighted works to train its large language model. Additionally, the startup has been accused of passing off large segments of entire articles to its users without proper attribution. "Rather than create their own content, they're stealing ours to compete with us without our permission, without compensation, and undermining our very business that feeds their machines in the first place," said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News Media Alliance, which organized the lawsuit on behalf of its members. "That's theft." The suit also says the company has engaged in trademark infringement, suggesting that the algorithm would send articles to users with proper attribution, using the publisher's name, but the article itself would be filled with hallucinated and incorrect information. One example given in the suit involves a piece that The Guardian published about Hamas's attack on the Nova music festival in Israel, only the AI conflated the terror attack with a 2020 shooting in Nova Scotia, Canada. The publishers are seeking the maximum amount of damages under the Copyright Act, which is $150,000 per work infringed. The suit also wants to reduce the access that Cohere has to copyrighted works. They also hope to set a legal precedent to "establish the terms of the playing field for licensed use of journalism for AI, including for training and also real-time uses," according to Pam Wasserstein, president of Vox Media. Vox publishes stuff like The Verge, New York Magazine and Polygon. Cohere is currently valued at $5 billion. The company creates software that developers can use to build AI applications for business use. It also operates a chatbot for general users. It has received backing from venture-capital firms like Index Ventures and companies like NVIDIA and Salesforce.

Major publishers launch copyright lawsuit against Canadian AI startup - SiliconANGLE

Major publishers launch copyright lawsuit against Canadian AI startup Several major publishers are suing the Canadian AI startup Cohere Inc., alleging that the company engaged in "systematic copyright and trademark infringement," the latest in a long line of copyright lawsuits publishers have launched against AI firms. "Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing," said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. "Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands." The group includes Condé Nast, the mass media giant and owner of brands such as Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Pitchfork, Wired, and Ars Technica. It was joined by other news behemoths, including The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, the Toronto Star, and Vox Media. They claim Cohere, a company valued at over $5 billion, improperly used over 4,000 copyrighted works to train its large language model. The company is also accused of replicating large sections of work through its chatbot without properly attributing the sources. Moreover, the lawsuit claims when the chatbot has re-produced content with attribution, there have been "hallucinations" that have resulted in mistakes, tainting the companies that were said to be the source. An example given, which was supposed to be from the Guardian, discussed the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival in Israel but seemed to get this mixed up with the 2020 shootings in Nova Scotia, Canada. The plaintiffs are seeking the maximum under the Copyright Act, which would be $150,000 for every work that has been infringed. The publishers are also asking for a legal precedent to "establish the terms of the playing field for licensed use of journalism for AI, including for training and also real-time uses." In a statement, Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere, said the company "strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI." He added that the lawsuit is "misguided and frivolous" and that Cohere "would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns -- and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach -- rather than learning about them in a filing."

AI Firm Cohere Sued By Publishers Over Copyright Infringement | PYMNTS.com

A group of news publishers has sued artificial intelligence (AI) firm Cohere for copyright infringement. The federal lawsuit, filed Thursday (Feb. 13) in New York, accuses Cohere of improperly using at least 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI large language model, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Thursday. In addition, the suit also accuses Cohere of displaying large portions of articles -- if not articles in their entirety -- while bypassing visits to the publishers' websites. And in some cases, the suit said, Cohere has infringed on publishers' trademarks by producing "hallucinated" material -- with information that was never actually published by the news outlet -- under a publisher's name. "Our content is being stored and used to create verbatim and substitutional copies of our material," said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News Media Alliance, which organized the suit on behalf of its members. "That's theft." According to the WSJ, the suit seeks $150,000 in damages -- the maximum under the law -- for each instance of copyright infringement. They also want Cohere to destroy any copyrighted work within its possession. A spokesperson for Cohere told PYMNTS the company stands by its training practices and prioritizes controls to reduce the risk of intellectual property infringement. "We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns -- and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach -- rather than learning about them in a filing," the spokesperson said. "We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous, and expect this matter to be resolved in our favor." Plaintiffs in the suit include Condé Nast parent Advance, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Business Insider, Newsday and The Toronto Star. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal actions by media outlets against AI companies accused of copyright infringement. For example, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in December 2023. The two AI partners were sued again last June, this time by the Center for Investigative Reporting, owner of the magazine Mother Jones. "OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more valuable, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material," Monika Bauerlein, CEO of CIR, said in a news release. "This free rider behavior is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright." OpenAI has said it works collaboratively with news publishers. And indeed, the company last year launched a partnership with News Corp, though experts say that collaboration could ultimately go beyond just news. "Most people will see the OpenAI-News Corp deal and assume it's about training data. It's not. It's about ChatGPT competing with Google Search," Nathaniel Whittemore, CEO of AI education company Superintelligent, told PYMNTS at the time. "OpenAI doesn't just want ChatGPT to help you with your writing; it wants ChatGPT to help you with everything," he added. "That means turning ChatGPT into your primary gateway to the rest of the world."

Publishers sue AI startup Cohere over alleged copyright infringement | TechCrunch

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.

News publishers sue Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement

Why it matters: The lawsuit represents the first official legal action against an AI company organized by the News Media Alliance -- the largest news media trade group in the U.S. Zoom in: The federal lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges Cohere engaged in unauthorized use of content from NMA publishers to power its AI products, which they believe violates copyright law. Between the lines: The complaint was filed shortly after the U.S. Copyright Office changed its copyright registration processes to make them faster for digital publishers. Because of those changes, Coffey explained, NMA and the publishers who are suing Cohere were able to identify thousands of specific examples of Cohere verbatim copying their copyright-protected works. The other side: "Cohere strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI," company spokesperson Josh Gartner told Axios. The big picture: For the past year, the news industry appeared split in its approach to working with AI firms. While some organizations opted to sue certain AI companies, others struck deals. What's next: As part of the lawsuit, the publishers are seeking a permanent injunction prohibiting Cohere from using their works, should a judge find Cohere guilty of copyright and trademark infringement.

Condé Nast, other news orgs say AI firm stole articles, spit out "hallucinations"

Condé Nast and several other media companies sued the AI startup Cohere today, alleging that it engaged in "systematic copyright and trademark infringement" by using news articles to train its large language model. "Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence ('AI') service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. "Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands." Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica and other publications such as Wired and The New Yorker, was joined in the lawsuit by The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, The Plain Dealer, Politico, The Republican, the Toronto Star, and Vox Media. The complaint seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act for each infringed work, or an amount based on actual damages and Cohere's profits. It also seeks "actual damages, Cohere's profits, and statutory damages up to the maximum provided by law" for infringement of trademarks and "false designations of origin." In Exhibit A, the plaintiffs identified over 4,000 articles in what they called an "illustrative and non-exhaustive list of works that Cohere has infringed." Additional exhibits provide responses to queries and "hallucinations" that the publishers say infringe upon their copyrights and trademarks. The lawsuit said Cohere "passes off its own hallucinated articles as articles from Publishers." In a statement provided to Ars, Cohere called the lawsuit frivolous. "Cohere strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI," the company said today. "We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement and respect the rights of holders. We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns -- and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach -- rather than learning about them in a filing. We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous, and expect this matter to be resolved in our favor."

Media companies sue Toronto AI firm Cohere over alleged copyright infringement

TORONTO -- A group of major U.S. media companies and the owner of the Toronto Star are suing artificial intelligence firm Cohere over copyright infringement. In a complaint filed with a New York court Thursday, publishers including Condé Nast, McClatchy, Forbes Media and Guardian News allege Toronto-based Cohere has infringed on copyright by scraping copies of their articles from the internet without the publishers' permission or compensation. They allege Cohere then used the articles to train the large language models powering its AI services, which in turn "mimics, undercuts, and competes" with the publishers and other "lawful" offerings. "Publishers value innovation and the promise that artificial intelligence holds if ethically deployed. In fact, many publishers already license their articles to AI companies," the media companies say in their lawsuit. "But Cohere improperly usurps publishers' creative labour and investments for the sake of its own profits." In hundreds of pages of court documents, they describe instances where Cohere repurposed their material and even includes situations where the company's software allegedly spat out so-called hallucinated information -- AI-generated material that is false or misleading -- under a publisher's name. "Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands," their claim reads. The media companies are asking the court for an order stopping Cohere from using their copyrighted works for training or fine-tuning AI models, along with up to $150,000 for every article they allege Cohere infringed. Cohere spokesperson Josh Gartner expects the court to side with Cohere because it has long worked to mitigate the risk of intellectual property infringement. "We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns -- and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach -- rather than learning about them in a filing," he wrote in an email. "We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous and expect this matter to be resolved in our favour." Cohere's faceoff with the group of publishers, which also includes the companies behind the Los Angeles Times, Vox, Politico and the Atlantic, brings a layer of criticism to the business often thought of as one of Canada's most promising AI firms. The company develops AI for enterprise use, meaning it helps businesses build powerful applications by using large language models -- algorithms relying on massive data sets to recognize, translate, predict or generate text and other content. The business, which the lawsuit alleges is now worth $5 billion, got its start in 2019 under Aidan Gomez, a Google Brain researcher, and tech worker Ivan Zhang. Nick Frosst, also a co-founder and former Google staffer, joined the mix a year later, ahead of a rush of funding from AI icons including Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Raquel Urtasun and Pieter Abbeel. Semiconductor giant Nvidia, federal government agency Export Development Canada and investment arms of tech companies like Salesforce, Cisco and Oracle are also backers. Paul Deegan, president of industry group News Media Canada, said in an email that the company's investors "should be asking Cohere's management very tough questions about these allegations." Cohere is now finding itself in the same situation as many of its AI-developer counterparts. OpenAI, the San Francisco-based creator of AI chatbot ChatGPT, was sued in November over similar copyright allegations. The coalition who brought the lawsuit forward includes The Canadian Press, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada. The New York Times has also gone after OpenAI and Microsoft, while the owner of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post has targeted Perplexity, an AI-powered, conversational search engine. The litigation comes as the media industry has faced financial difficulties, resulting in layoffs and the closures of some news businesses. Ad budgets dedicated toward journalism companies have shrunk as have the number of newspapers and subscribers amid the rise of social media. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 13, 2025. ---

Vox Media and other publishers sue Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement.

The Wall Street Journal reports that The Verge's parent company, Vox Media, and other publishers like Conde Nast, Forbes Media, and Politico filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit (pdf) against the enterprise AI company Cohere. They say evidence shows Cohere uses unlicensed copies of content to directly compete with publishers, and they list 4,000 specific examples of "verbatim regurgitations and substitutional summaries of news content."

AI companies flaunt their theft. News media has to fight back - so we're suing. | Opinion

The AI Summit in Paris has drawn world leaders, tech executives, and researchers to shape the future of artificial intelligence. While many seek global cooperation, the event highlights deep geopolitical divides, particularly between the US and China. The American economy is built on intellectual property. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office estimated that 41% of U.S. gross domestic product comes from IP-intensive industries. From podcasters to influencers to newspapers, intellectual property powers free speech and incentivizes the creative process and investment in quality works. Artificial intelligence companies have recognized this quality but unfortunately have chosen to take advantage of others' intellectual property to fuel their products. Now the Chinese AI app DeepSeek is teaching those very AI companies how much it costs by using their creativity and intelligence. This country has flourished by encouraging experimentation and legally protecting the results, but in the past few decades, as technology has changed, new decisions are needed to fit our law to new technology. That's why on Thursday, for the first time ever, a diverse group of news and magazine members of the News/Media Alliance came together to sue an AI company that we believe has been egregiously violating copyright protections as it trains its model and spits out answers for its users. The plaintiffs include Advance Local Media, Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Business Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy Media Co., Newsday, Plain Dealer Publishing Co., Politico, The Republican Co., Toronto Star Newspapers and Vox Media. The suit is against Cohere Inc., a rapidly growing AI company that we're accusing of not even trying to hide the fact that it is lifting content and offering it free ‒ and verbatim ‒ to users. Cohere has achieved a valuation of more than $5 billion through massive, systematic copyright and trademark infringement of media content. The Canadian company flaunts the evidence, providing its own receipts. In a feature called "Under the Hood," as documented in our lawsuit, Cohere shows the sources it copied to deliver its outputs, including full copies of our articles, down to the timestamp of the copying. Cohere provides users with verbatim regurgitations, fully substitutional summaries and breaking news reports. Thursday's complaint alleges thousands of examples of infringements, down to the timestamp of the copying. There's nothing subtle about Cohere's many acts of what we believe to be theft. The suit details verbatim lifting of articles, even the posting of a story within an hour of publication. When asked for a particular October 2024 article in the L.A. Times for instance, Cohere delivered the entire article verbatim with only slight wording and punctuation changes. When asked generally about financial strains on the public transit system in Miami-Dade County, Cohere delivered a complete article from the Miami Herald, with only a minor change to the first sentence. In another prompt, Cohere was asked to provide the text of a Forbes article - and it did, complete with the byline of the Forbes writer. Lawsuits can be long and costly, but we have no choice. We've tried everything over the years - digitally reserving or marking our content as off-limits to bots and scrapers, updating our terms of service, working directly with tech companies, insisting they give back a little of the traffic they have used our content to gain, sometimes even paying them for it. Nonetheless, the overwhelming benefit has gone to AI companies, and we in the media business have been left with a fraction of the value that our own content has created. This suit is consistent with the courageous examples of The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft on unauthorized use of its articles in generative AI products, and News Corp., which is alleging the same against Perplexity AI, while turning the focus on new actors and unauthorized uses - to enforce our rights and deter other AI companies from stealing content. This is not an anti-AI lawsuit or an effort to turn back the clock. We love technology. We use it in our businesses. Artificial intelligence will help us better serve our customers, but only if it respects intellectual property. That's the remedy we're seeking in court. When it suits them, the AI companies assert similar claims to ours. Meta's lawsuit accused Bright Data of scraping data in violation of its terms of use. And Sam Altman of OpenAI has complained that DeepSeek illegally copied its algorithms. Good actors, responsible technologies and potential legislation offer some hope for improving the situation. But what is urgently needed is what every market needs: reinforcement of legal protections against theft.