Several major publishers, including Politico and Vox, have filed a lawsuit against AI startup Cohere, accusing the company of copyright and trademark infringement.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit alleges that Cohere improperly used over 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI model and distributed large portions of articles without proper attribution.
This legal action is the latest in an ongoing battle between content creators and AI companies that allegedly use their intellectual property without permission.
Copyright and Trademark Infringement Claims
The publishers claim that Cohere’s AI system has engaged in deceptive practices, providing users with articles that appear to be sourced from major publishers but contain inaccurate or “hallucinated” information.
The lawsuit cites an example where an AI-generated summary of a Guardian article about Hamas’s attack on the Nova music festival in Israel was falsely conflated with a 2020 shooting in Nova Scotia, Canada.
“Rather than create their own content, they’re stealing ours to compete with us without our permission, without compensation, and undermining our very business that feeds their machines in the first place,” said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News Media Alliance, which organized the lawsuit. “That’s theft.”
