Advance Local Media v. Cohere: a federal judge lets publishers' copyright and trademark claims over an AI assistant's "substitutive summaries" proceed

What happened

• The publishers filed the complaint on February 13, 2025. The decision lists the plaintiffs as Advance Local Media LLC; Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. d/b/a Conde Nast; The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC; Forbes Media LLC; Guardian News & Media Limited; Insider, Inc.; Los Angeles Times Communications LLC; The McClatchy Company, LLC; Newsday, LLC; Plain Dealer Publishing Co.; Politico LLC; The Republican Company; Toronto Star Newspapers Limited; and Vox Media, LLC.
• Cohere is a Canadian company that develops and licenses AI models. Its main product is a family of large language models called Command, which it markets as a "knowledge assistant" for business users.
• The complaint alleges that Cohere copies publishers' works by crawling websites and by using the Common Crawl dataset, and that Command's retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) feature, which pulls in outside sources, returns full verbatim copies, substantial excerpts or substitutive summaries of articles. It also alleges that users can see full copies of paywalled articles in a "Playground" feature called "Under the Hood."
• With RAG off, the complaint alleges, Command "will often hallucinate an answer," producing made-up article text under real publishers' trademarks.
• Four counts: direct copyright infringement, secondary copyright infringement, trademark infringement under 15 U.S.C. § 1114(1) and false designation of origin under § 1125(a)(1)(A). Cohere moved to dismiss Counts II to IV, and Count I only to the extent it rests on the "substitutive summaries" theory.
• The complaint attaches 75 examples. The decision says 50 are alleged to include verbatim copies and 25 a mix of verbatim copying and close paraphrase.

What the court said

• Substitutive summaries (Count I): the motion was denied. The court accepted that Cohere may republish underlying facts ("There is no question that Cohere is entitled to republish the underlying facts"), but found the publishers plausibly alleged outputs that copy original expression, citing an example said to copy eight of ten paragraphs of a New Yorker article with very minor alterations.
• The twenty percent argument: Cohere relied on a Second Circuit case on how much copying is enough. The court answered that the case expressly declined to set a quantitative rule and that the question cannot be decided by word count at this stage.
• Secondary infringement (Count II): denied. The court rejected Cohere's three arguments: that direct infringement was not adequately alleged, that actual knowledge of specific infringement was missing and that the inducement allegations were conclusory. It found plausible that Cohere takes affirmative steps to foster infringement by advertising Command as a tool to access news.
• Lanham Act (Counts III and IV): denied. The court found plausible that the marks are displayed in connection with a commercial transaction and that consumer confusion is likely. On nominative fair use it wrote that the doctrine "does not allow a defendant to use a plaintiff's trademark to falsely attribute its own goods to the plaintiff," and said it was doubtful the doctrine applies on these facts but would not decide it on a motion to dismiss.
• Standard: every fact above is an allegation taken as true for the motion. The decision finds no infringement and no liability.

What it means for your firm

• Our reading: this is a pleading-stage ruling about AI summaries of news. The court did not say a summary infringes; it said the publishers alleged enough, including verbatim paragraphs, to go to discovery.
• Summaries are not automatically safe. If a tool you use produces long, close paraphrases of paid articles, treat the output as a copy for your own risk review, not as your own words.
• The hallucination theory travels: a made-up article attributed to a real outlet is both a verification failure and, here, a pleaded trademark claim.
• A firm that quotes a news article from an AI answer into a client alert or brief should confirm the quote and the attribution against the publication.
• The same decision shows the retrieval feature is where claims attach: ask vendors what their tools fetch live, store and show.

What to do Monday

1. Add a rule that any AI-generated summary of a news or magazine article used in client or public material is compared against the original and rewritten or properly quoted.
2. Require a link to the original publication, checked by a person, for every news fact or quotation an AI tool supplies to a legal work product.
3. Ask each AI vendor in writing whether its tool retrieves paywalled content at answer time and what it displays or stores.
4. Read the live docket for No. 1:25-cv-01305 before you rely on or cite anything about the case beyond the November 13, 2025 decision.

Sources

• Decision and Order Denying Defendant's Partial Motion to Dismiss, Dkt. 59 (Nov 13, 2025), CourtListener RECAP copy of the docket entry
• Complaint, Dkt. 1 (Feb 13, 2025)

Operational information, not legal advice. Facts come from the filings on the court docket linked under Sources, read on Oct 31, 2026. A docket moves: this brief covers only the filings we read and does not replace the live docket. The reading of what it means for your firm is ours.