• by Ray Schultz , November 16, 2025

A federal judge has rejected a motion by Cohere Inc. to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed against it earlier this year by several major publishers.  

Canada-based Cohere sought to dismiss three counts in the suit for “failure to state a claim on which relief can be grounded.” It also challenged the plaintiffs’ argument that “substituted summaries” were copyright violations, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon observed. But McMahon rejected that claim.  

The suit was filed in February by Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. (Condé Nast) 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 basic case: “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,” the publishers’ complaint alleges." 

This allegedly was done using Cohere’s Command feature.  

But Cohere rejects that it is culpable. 

“Plaintiffs style this case as the latest in a string of lawsuits accusing an AI company of enabling the public to infringe copyrights," Cohere says in its motion to dismiss. "But Defendant Cohere Inc. is a different kind of AI company, so Plaintiffs’ copycat claims fall flat. Other AI companies market conversational chatbots to hundreds of millions of users. Cohere specializes in privately deployed, business- focused (or “enterprise”) AI solutions that allow companies to work smarter, faster, and better.”

The answer continues, “This large language model training theory ultimately turns on the defense of copyright fair use, a fact-bound issue that is being resolved in generative AI litigation across the country, and that Cohere will advance on summary judgment on a full factual record.”

McMahon rejected the fair use argument, saying that she “need not and will not evaluate the merits of Cohere's nominative fair use argument on a motion to dismiss. All I can and will do is conclude that the complaint adequately alleges facts that could, if proved, cause a trier of fact to reject application of that doctrine.” 

The judge continued, “Nor is the court persuaded by Cohere's argument that Command's delivery of hallucinated articles falsely attributed to Publishers ‘has no bearing on the nature of the use, which is simply to identify.’ Publishers point out that under this flawed logic, any company could use the Chanel mark to identify handbags, for instance, even when those handbags did not originate from Chanel.”

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