A coalition of 14 publishers, including Condé Nast Group, The Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes, has recently filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Cohere, accusing the startup of “massive and systematic” copyright and trademark infringement.

Cohere is an artificial intelligence (AI) technology development company founded in 2019 and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, which was co-founded by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, according to the company.

In the complaint, the plaintiff publishers say that Cohere harmed the publishers' referral traffic by using at least 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI models and displaying articles verbatim without citing specific articles or publications. The complaint also alleges that Cohere produced some of the fake news attributed to the publishers' releases, which the lawsuit calls “damaging illusions.”

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of recent cases against AI companies for allegedly infringing on intellectual property rights. A number of AI companies, including OpenAI, have begun adopting content licensing strategies, both to avoid potential legal risks and to argue that their use of copyrighted material complies with the fair use doctrine.