A New York State court has rejected Toronto AI startup Cohere’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by several U.S. publishers and the Toronto Star over alleged copyright and trademark infringement.
A coalition of major publishers, including Toronto Star Newspapers, Forbes Media, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vox Media and Politico, took the Toronto- and San Francisco-based company to court in February 2025 for allegedly using the publishers’ content without consent to train its large AI language models, including Command, which Cohere promotes as a “knowledge assistant” and tool for accessing news.
None of the allegations have been proven in court.
Cohere filed a dismissal motion in May and argued that it is only directly liable for generating “substitutive summaries” of the publishers’ works that are not substantially similar to the original news and magazine pieces, according to a court document.
“Publishers have adequately alleged that Command’s outputs are quantitatively and qualitatively similar,” wrote Judge Colleen McMahon in her decision to turn down Cohere’s motion.
“Publishers have plausibly pleaded that Cohere takes affirmative steps to foster infringement by advertising Command as a tool to access news in order to solicit customers,” the judge’s decision reads.
The lawsuit against the startup is part of a growing number of cases in which media outlets are fighting AI companies in court, alleging copyright infringement. A group of Canadian media companies, including The Canadian Press, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia, and CBC/Radio-Canada, sued ChatGPT creator OpenAI in Ontario last December. That case is still ongoing.
Meanwhile, some U.S. publishers have successfully reached licensing deals with OpenAI, reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
North American newsrooms have been forced to trim staff or shut down businesses in recent years as advertising revenue has plunged.
“We’re grateful that Judge McMahon soundly rejected all aspects of Cohere’s motion to dismiss,” said Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the industry trade association News Media Alliance. “This decision is the first step towards justice for these publishers, who deserve the full legal protection offered by the law for their intellectual property.”
Cohere said in an email to the Star that it would not comment on active litigation. The company, which was recently valued at $6.8 billion (U.S.), told the Star earlier this year that it “strongly stands by” its practice for training its AI responsibly.
A court document filed by the publishers lists over 4,000 news articles that the media companies claim Cohere has “infringed” and that its AI tool could output “full verbatim copies, substantial excerpts” of those articles, even though some are behind paywalls. The publishers are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed upon.
“Our newsrooms work hard every day to provide essential, fact-checked reporting to Canadians. High-quality journalism is valuable and takes resources to produce,” said Angus Frame, President of Torstar Corporation.
“We are glad to see a growing movement to fairly compensate those who create original news and content. We will continue to take a stand against the theft of our intellectual property by AI companies.”
According to the judge’s decision to reject Cohere’s motion, Cohere also tried to dismiss the publishers’ claims that the AI company sometimes generates made-up articles that appear under the publishers’ trademarks, misleading users into thinking the content came from them.
The judge concluded that “publishers have also adequately alleged that Cohere’s use of publishers’ trademarks constitutes ‘use in commerce’ because such use is likely to divert traffic, sales, and subscriptions from publishers.”
