Lawsuit alleges ‘massive, systemic copyright and trademark infringement’ of intellectual property rights
In a complaint filed in the Southern District Court of New York on Thursday, the publishers accuse Cohere of using unlicensed copies of news and magazine articles to train its AI systems and of displaying articles verbatim without citing the specific article or publication. The complaint includes 4,000 specific examples of this occurring. It also said that Cohere produces fake news pieces attributed to publishers, which the suit calls “damaging hallucinations.”
Cohere is “not content with just stealing our works, (it) also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us,” the filing noted.
One of the examples included in the litigation refers to an October 2024 piece by the Toronto Star about ticket theft on Ticketmaster for Taylor Swift’s Eras concert tour. It claims that Cohere’s chat output copies various phrases from the article word-for-word and includes “similar phrasing and styling” to the Toronto Star story. Cohere’s AI-powered chat tool “paraphrases so closely that it diminishes interest in lawfully accessing the originals,” the filing said.
“Cohere strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI. We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement and respect the rights of holders,” company spokesperson Josh Gartner said in an emailed statement to the Financial Post. The company called the lawsuit “misguided and frivolous.” Gartner added that Cohere “expects the matter to be resolved in our favour.”
Tech firms argue that their AI models should be “fair use” — a legal principle designed to protect freedom of expression that allows for the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works. In recent years, a growing chorus of publishers, authors, musicians and other holders of material protected by intellectual property laws, have sued AI companies for copyright infringement, countering that these firms illegally copy their works and jeopardize their livelihoods.
This week, information and technology company Thomson Reuters won a landmark case against now-defunct legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. A Delaware judge ruled that the startup unlawfully copied Thomson Reuters’ content to build its AI-based legal platform. In November 2024, a collective of Canada’s leading news companies, including the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Press, and Postmedia — the parent company of the Financial Post — launched a lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement and “unjustly enriching themselves at the expense” of news media companies.
On Feb. 8, Cohere chief executive Aidan Gomez posted on X a photo of a full-page ad that the company placed in the Wall Street Journal. The ad read: “Ordinary AI is good for cocktail recipes — and stealing intellectual property.” Gomez wrote under the photo: “AI is only as useful as the data it can access, and the systems it can control. If it can’t see the data that answers your question, or can’t control the systems needed to automate, then value is left on the table.”