Cohere

In a published essay, Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez criticized rival AI leaders (naming Anthropic's Dario Amodei) for calling for a coordinated industry slowdown, arguing that a mechanism which slows everyone down while preserving incumbents' commercial advantage does not make AI safer and risks entrenching dominant AI companies. Gomez instead called for an independent international framework for AI harms with genuinely independent testing bodies - contrasting this with 'handpicked' auditors he said risk regulatory capture - and for mandatory transparency when serious AI incidents occur.

In Q1 2026, Cohere expanded into military AI, signing agreements with TKMS (Jan 13) and Hanwha Ocean (Mar 31) - the two competing bidders for Canada's up to $60 billion, 12-submarine Canadian Patrol Submarine Project - to build AI decision-support, engineering, and design tools for their rival bids. Cohere also partnered with Saab (Mar 23) to develop AI for the GlobalEye airborne early-warning surveillance system pursued for Canada, and with Thales for AI on patrol ships. Cohere made no public statement addressing the apparent conflict of representing both submarine bidders simultaneously.

On February 13, 2025 a coalition of major US news publishers including Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Politico, The Republican Company, Toronto Star and Vox Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Cohere in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleged Cohere ingested and reproduced full articles from at least 4,000 publications and that the company's hallucinations falsely attributed fabricated content to named publishers. The suit was among the largest publisher-led actions against an enterprise AI company.

In submissions to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada's consultation on 'Copyright in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence' (reported June 22, 2024), Toronto-based Cohere argued that AI training does not infringe copyright and that remuneration to rights holders 'would not be appropriate,' comparing model training to a person reading books to learn. Cohere also opposed proposed mandatory disclosure of copyrighted works used in training datasets, arguing this was 'effectively impossible to discern' at scale, and warned that licensing requirements would push AI development out of Canada. Google and Microsoft submitted similar positions in the same consultation; Music Canada (representing Sony, Universal, and Warner Music divisions) opposed the exemption, urging Ottawa not to let AI developers 'exploit creations without permission or compensation.'

Cohere was among the first AI companies to sign Canada's Voluntary Code of Conduct on Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI Systems in September 2023, publicly endorsed the proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) legislation and engaged constructively with regulators on national-AI-strategy planning. The stance contrasted with US AI companies' lobbying against state-level AI regulation in California and elsewhere.

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and co-founders publicly committed throughout 2022-2024 to keeping Cohere's commercial focus strictly on enterprise deployments rather than consumer-facing chatbots, citing concerns that consumer-facing LLM products create the highest harm and misuse surface area. Gomez served on Canada's AI Advisory Council and signed the May 2023 Center for AI Safety statement on extinction risk. The decision was a notable contrast to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Mistral consumer chatbot rollouts.