The Atlantic, Politico, Vox and other major publishers are suing AI startup Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement, escalating the news industry’s legal battle over the technology. The publishers are accusing the Canadian company, which they say is valued at over $5 billion, of improperly using at least 4,000 copyrighted works to train its large language model and of displaying large portions of or entire articles for users while bypassing visits to the publishers’ websites. In some cases, according to the suit, Cohere is also infringing on publishers’ trademarks by delivering “hallucinated” material—with information that wasn’t actually published by the outlet—under a publisher’s name. “Our content is being stored and used to create verbatim and substitutional copies of our material,” said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News Media Alliance, which organized the lawsuit on behalf of its members. “That’s theft.” The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the Southern District of New York, piles onto existing tensions between publishers and the AI companies that use news and other content to advance their technology.

Full report : The Atlantic, Politico, Vox and others sue Cohere, alleging it used copyrighted works to train its LLM and shared versions of entire articles without permission.