Exposed: Cohere

Cohere is an enterprise AI company that builds large language models specifically designed for business applications including document search, customer support automation, content generation, and data analysis. Unlike consumer-facing AI chatbots, Cohere models process sensitive enterprise data including internal documents, customer communications, proprietary research, legal contracts, financial records, and human resources information. The company offers deployment options including cloud API, private cloud, and on-premises installations, giving enterprises varying levels of control over where their data is processed. Cohere Command and Embed models are used by enterprise customers to build AI applications that interact with their most confidential business information. The company has positioned itself as a more privacy-conscious alternative to OpenAI for enterprise customers, offering data isolation guarantees and the ability to fine-tune models on proprietary data without that data being used to improve shared models. However, the cloud API deployment, which is the most commonly used option, processes enterprise data on Cohere shared infrastructure, creating questions about data isolation between customers in a multi-tenant environment. Cohere trained its base models on web-scraped data like other AI companies, and the enterprise fine-tuning process involves processing customer proprietary data that may contain trade secrets, personally identifiable information, and legally privileged communications. The company Canadian headquarters subjects it to different data protection regulations than US-based competitors, with implications for cross-border data processing.