• by Ray Schultz , July 5, 2025

A coalition of publishers is awaiting word on whether their copyright suit against Cohere Inc. will be dismissed. 

Cohere filed a motion in May, asking the court to dismiss counts II through IV, and count I for “failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.” The publishers answered last week, calling on the court to deny Cohere’s bid. 

The publishers sued the Canadian firm last February, accusing it of scraping content from their sites, and using it for training large language models (LLMs) and to power its AI service that they charge competes with their own offerings. 

Cohere has denied the allegations, and said in its motion that the publishers pled only “the mere suggestion of what an LLM is capable of doing.” 

But the publishers called this “a strawman,” and assert that Cohere “essentially acts as an unlicensed news syndicator.”

“Rather than conduct its own journalism, Cohere supplies users with articles taken without consent from, or compensation to, the creators of the content,” they allege.

Cohere claims that its infringing outputs have not reached “a meaningful segment of consumers,” the publishers report. But they counter that this does not relieve the firm of liability.

The publishers start their answer to Cohere’s motion as follows: 

“Cohere describes itself as ‘a different kind of AI company’ and its technology as ‘groundbreaking.’ But there is nothing remarkable about copying articles off the internet, republishing copies of those articles, or distributing subpar products under another company’s good name. That is old-fashioned infringement.”

Presumably, Cohere will answer that assault before the court makes its decision. 

The publishers include Advance Local Media, Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Business Insider, LA Times, McClatchy Media Company, Newsday, Plain Dealer Publishing Company, Politico, The Republican Company, Toronto Star Newspapers and Vox Media.

The case is on file with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.