Major publishing houses, including Politico and Vox, and their parent companies are suing AI startup Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement, the Wall Street Journal reports. This is the latest salvo in the ongoing war between humans who create content and artificial intelligence algorithms that mimic human-generated content.
Various publishing houses, including The Atlantic and The Guardian, have accused Cohere of improperly using more than 4,000 copyrighted works to train its large language model. In addition, the startup was accused of passing on large segments of entire articles to users without proper attribution.
“Instead of creating their own content, they’re stealing ours to compete with us without our permission, without compensation, and undermining our business that feeds their machines in the first place,” said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News Media Alliance, which organized the lawsuit on behalf of its members. “This is theft.”
The lawsuit also claims that the company has violated trademark rights by suggesting that the algorithm will send users articles with proper attribution using the publisher’s name, but the article itself will be filled with hallucinations and false information. One of the examples cited in the lawsuit concerns an article published by The Guardian about the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival in Israel, only to be linked by artificial intelligence to the shooting in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 2020.
The publishers are seeking the maximum amount of damages under the Copyright Act, which is $150,000 for each infringed work. The lawsuit also seeks to restrict Cohere’s access to copyrighted works. According to Pam Wasserstein, president of Vox Media, they also hope to set a legal precedent to “establish the rules of the game for the licensed use of journalism for AI, including for training as well as real-time use.” Vox publishes materials such as The Verge, New York Magazine, and Polygon.
Coere sent Engadget a statement on the matter, saying that it “stands by its practice of responsible training of corporate artificial intelligence. We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of intellectual property infringement and respect the rights of rights holders.” The company stated that it believes that “the lawsuit is false and frivolous and expects this case to be resolved in our favor.”
Cohere is currently valued at $5 billion. The company creates software that developers can use to create artificial intelligence applications for businesses. It also operates a chatbot for ordinary users. It has received support from venture capital firms such as Index Ventures and companies such as NVIDIA and Salesforce.
Of course, this is only the latest lawsuit filed against an AI company on behalf of a publisher. In 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, and News Corp brands, including The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, sued Perplexity back in October. The New York Times also has claims against Perplexity. Just this week, a judge ruled in favor of Reuters in a lawsuit against Ross Intelligence, an artificial intelligence company.
