TORONTO – Cohere is asking a U.S. court to throw out the bulk of a lawsuit from media outlets that have accused the artificial intelligence company of infringing on their copyright.
In a dismissal motion filed in a New York court, Cohere accuses publishers including the Toronto Star, Condé Nast, McClatchy, Forbes Media and Guardian News of deliberately using its software to manufacture a case.
Cohere says the outlets must have stylized prompts they entered into its software to elicit portions of their own work, which sometimes included inaccuracies.
Cohere says nothing in the complaint filed by the outlets suggests that any real customer has ever used the company’s software to infringe on the publisher’s copyright.
The response Cohere filed comes months after the group of mostly U.S. publishers asked a court to stop the Toronto-based company from using their copyrighted works for training or fine-tuning AI models.
They also want the court to force Cohere to pay up to $150,000 for every article they allege the firm scraped from their websites and then trained its products on.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 23, 2025.
Torstar Corp. and a related company of the Globe and Mail hold investments in The Canadian Press.
