Several major publishers are suing the Canadian artificial intelligence startup Cohere Inc., alleging that the company engaged in “systematic copyright and trademark infringement,” the latest in a long line of copyright lawsuits publishers have launched against AI firms.

“Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing,” said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. “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.”

The group includes Condé Nast, the mass media giant and owner of brands such as Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Pitchfork, Wired and Ars Technica. It was joined by other news behemoths, including The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, the Toronto Star and Vox Media.

They claim Cohere, a company valued at more than $5 billion, improperly used more than 4,000 copyrighted works to train its large language model. The company is also accused of replicating large sections of work through its chatbot without properly attributing the sources.

Moreover, the lawsuit claims when the chatbot has reproduced content with attribution, there have been “hallucinations” that have resulted in mistakes, tainting the companies that were said to be the source. An example given, which was supposed to be from the Guardian, discussed the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival in Israel but seemed to get this mixed up with the 2020 shootings in Nova Scotia, Canada.

The plaintiffs are seeking the maximum under the Copyright Act, which would be $150,000 for every work that has been infringed. The publishers are also asking for a legal precedent to “establish the terms of the playing field for licensed use of journalism for AI, including for training and also real-time uses.”

In a statement, Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere, said the company “strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI.” He added that the lawsuit is “misguided and frivolous” and that Cohere “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.”

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