TORONTO — A group of major U.S. media companies and the owner of the Toronto Star are suing artificial intelligence firm Cohere over copyright infringement.
In a complaint filed with a New York court Thursday, publishers including Condé Nast, McClatchy, Forbes Media and Guardian News allege Toronto-based Cohere has infringed on copyright by scraping copies of their articles from the internet without the publishers' permission or compensation.
They allege Cohere then used the articles to train the large language models powering its AI services, which in turn "mimics, undercuts, and competes" with the publishers and other "lawful" offerings.
"Publishers value innovation and the promise that artificial intelligence holds if ethically deployed. In fact, many publishers already license their articles to AI companies," the media companies say in their lawsuit.
"But Cohere improperly usurps publishers’ creative labour and investments for the sake of its own profits."
In hundreds of pages of court documents, they describe instances where Cohere repurposed their material and even includes situations where the company's software allegedly spat out so-called hallucinated information — AI-generated material that is false or misleading — under a publisher's name.
"Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands," their claim reads.
The media companies are asking the court for an order stopping Cohere from using their copyrighted works for training or fine-tuning AI models, along with up to $150,000 for every article they allege Cohere infringed.
Cohere spokesperson Josh Gartner expects the court to side with Cohere because it has long worked to mitigate the risk of intellectual property infringement.
"We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns — and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach — rather than learning about them in a filing," he wrote in an email.
"We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous and expect this matter to be resolved in our favour.”
Cohere's faceoff with the group of publishers, which also includes the companies behind the Los Angeles Times, Vox, Politico and the Atlantic, brings a layer of criticism to the business often thought of as one of Canada's most promising AI firms.
The company develops AI for enterprise use, meaning it helps businesses build powerful applications by using large language models — algorithms relying on massive data sets to recognize, translate, predict or generate text and other content.
The business, which the lawsuit alleges is now worth $5 billion, got its start in 2019 under Aidan Gomez, a Google Brain researcher, and tech worker Ivan Zhang.
Nick Frosst, also a co-founder and former Google staffer, joined the mix a year later, ahead of a rush of funding from AI icons including Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Raquel Urtasun and Pieter Abbeel.
Semiconductor giant Nvidia, federal government agency Export Development Canada and investment arms of tech companies like Salesforce, Cisco and Oracle are also backers.
Paul Deegan, president of industry group News Media Canada, said in an email that the company's investors "should be asking Cohere’s management very tough questions about these allegations."
Cohere is now finding itself in the same situation as many of its AI-developer counterparts.
OpenAI, the San Francisco-based creator of AI chatbot ChatGPT, was sued in November over similar copyright allegations. The coalition who brought the lawsuit forward includes The Canadian Press, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada.
The New York Times has also gone after OpenAI and Microsoft, while the owner of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post has targeted Perplexity, an AI-powered, conversational search engine.
The litigation comes as the media industry has faced financial difficulties, resulting in layoffs and the closures of some news businesses.
Ad budgets dedicated toward journalism companies have shrunk as have the number of newspapers and subscribers amid the rise of social media.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 13, 2025.
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Torstar Corp. and a related company of the Globe and Mail hold investments in The Canadian Press.
Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press