Lawsuit tracker
Publishers v. Cohere
Advance Local Media LLC, et al. v. Cohere Inc., No. 1:25-cv-01305 (S.D.N.Y.)
| Plaintiffs | Fourteen publishers, including Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Politico, Vox Media, Business Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, the Plain Dealer, The Republican Company, Toronto Star and Advance Local Media |
|---|---|
| Defendants | Cohere |
| Court | U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Judge Colleen McMahon) |
| Filed | 2025-02-13 |
| Status | Active |
| Content type | journalism |
| Last updated | 2026-07-21 |
The claims
Direct and secondary copyright infringement over training and over outputs — including verbatim excerpts and summaries the publishers call substitutive, sometimes of paywalled pieces — plus Lanham Act trademark claims over hallucinated articles falsely attributed to their brands. The complaint identifies more than 4,000 works and seeks up to $150,000 per infringed work plus an injunction.
What has happened
A coalition of magazine and news publishers, backed by the News/Media Alliance, sued Cohere over its Command family of models. They allege Command was trained on their articles and can output substantial portions of them — sometimes near-verbatim, sometimes as detailed summaries that substitute for the original, and sometimes from behind paywalls. They also allege Command hallucinates articles and misattributes them to publisher brands. In November 2025 Judge McMahon denied Cohere’s partial motion to dismiss in its entirety, holding that substitutive summaries can plausibly infringe even without verbatim copying and letting the secondary-liability and trademark theories proceed. Cohere answered in December 2025 and the case moved into discovery.
Key developments
- 2025-02-13 — Fourteen publishers file suit in the S.D.N.Y. — the first broad industry coalition case against an enterprise LLM vendor rather than a consumer chatbot maker.
- 2025-11-13 — Judge McMahon denies Cohere’s partial motion to dismiss in full: substitutive summary outputs can infringe, and hallucination-based trademark claims survive.
- 2025-12 — Cohere files its answer; the case proceeds to discovery.
Why it matters for training data
This was the first clean sweep for publishers at the pleadings stage on an output-substitution theory: “we summarize, we don’t copy” is not a safe harbor when the summary replaces the article. Hallucinated attribution now carries trademark-shaped risk too. Enterprise model vendors — not just consumer chatbot companies — are squarely in scope, which matters for anyone reselling or fine-tuning on news content.
Sources
- CourtListener docket: Advance Local Media v. Cohere
- Press Gazette: publishers win first round against Cohere
- Copyright Lately: AI news summaries may infringe
- News/Media Alliance on the motion-to-dismiss ruling
Deeper analysis
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