Publishers’ lawsuit against Cohere over copyright infringement allowed to proceed
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/11/2025 (286 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
TORONTO – A copyright infringement lawsuit several media companies launched against Toronto tech firm Cohere is being allowed to proceed, a U.S. court has ruled.
In a decision she recently rendered, New York judge Colleen McMahon labelled Cohere’s arguments “without merit” and said the publishers have made “adequate” allegations.
The decision comes months after publishers including the Toronto Star, Condé Nast and McClatchy had alleged Cohere infringed on their copyright by scraping their articles from the internet without the publishers’ permission or compensation.
The group of outlets, which also includes Forbes Media, Guardian News, the Los Angeles Times, Vox, Politico and the Atlantic, asked the court to stop Cohere from using their copyrighted works for training or fine-tuning AI models.
They want the company to pay up to $150,000 for every article they allege the firm unlawfully reproduced, distributed, and displayed.
Cohere, a Canadian company that develops artificial intelligence models used by businesses including Oracle, Dell, Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank and Bell, is fighting the allegations.
It argued the case should be dismissed because media companies deliberately used its software to “manufacture” a case and Cohere has no reason to believe any real customer has ever used its technology to infringe on publisher copyright.
In arguing for the case to be heard, the publishers submitted 75 examples of alleged infringement to the court.
The outlets said the examples show Cohere’s technology “heavily paraphrases and copies phrases verbatim from the source article, and that these summaries go well beyond a limited recitation of facts, including by lifting expression directly or parroting the piece’s organization, writing style, and punctation.”
Cohere claimed its output differs in style, tone, length and sentence structure from the publishers’ articles, but the court determined the tech company’s AI systems deliver material that is “nearly identical” to publishers’ work.
Thus, McMahon ruled that “Cohere’s argument that even where the summaries do copy some of publishers’ expression, they do so only minimally, rendering them non-infringing, is unavailing at the motion to dismiss stage.”
She reached a similar conclusion about several other arguments Cohere made and ultimately, determined that the case should not be dismissed.
The cast against Cohere is one of more than 50 lawsuits currently before the courts challenging the use of copyrighted works by artificial intelligence companies to train their large language models, McMahon said.
The Star, the Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, CBC/Radio-Canada and Postmedia are among a group of outlets pursuing a case against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, a popular AI chatbot.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 17, 2025.
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Torstar Corp. and a related company of the Globe and Mail hold investments in The Canadian Press.
