AI Firm Cohere Sued By Publishers Over Copyright Infringement

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.”