AI copyright news, graded by source

Judge McMahon denies Cohere's motion to dismiss publishers' claims over its Command model, holding that 'substitutive summaries' and investigator-gathered outputs can support infringement

On Nov. 13, 2025, Judge Colleen McMahon denied in full Cohere's partial motion to dismiss the suit by 14 publishers, including Conde Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, Politico, the Toronto Star and Vox Media. The publishers allege that Cohere's Command model returns full copies, substantial excerpts or "substitutive summaries" of their articles. The court held that the summaries theory states a direct infringement claim, rejecting Cohere's reading of the Second Circuit's Nihon Keizai decision as a word-count rule; that the 75 example outputs obtained by the publishers' investigators can support the claim even if the investigators breached Cohere's terms of service, since Cohere cited no case dismissing on that basis; that the contributory claim is judged under the Second Circuit's standard of knowing or having reason to know of the infringement, which the alleged copyright notices, robots.txt instructions and cease-and-desist letter satisfy; and that the Lanham Act claims over misattributed outputs survive. The decision describes the case as one of more than fifty AI training suits before the courts.