Cohere Responsible Use Policy

This policy sets out what Cohere forbids you from doing with its AI models: you cannot use generated text to fake public opinion, make important decisions about people without a human involved, spread misinformation, or produce hate-inciting content. Cohere also warns that its Command R models should not be used alone for decisions that significantly affect individuals, such as in financial services, employment, or housing. Cohere can restrict API access at any time if it determines your use case violates its guidelines.

Cohere's Responsible Use Policy establishes a set of high-severity prohibitions and use-case restrictions governing how users and developers may deploy Cohere's language models, including generated text and API access. The policy prohibits astroturfing, human-outside-the-loop decision-making, generation of misinformation, opinion-manipulating content, and hate-inciting or group-mischaracterizing material. It restricts use of Command R models as standalone tools for high-stakes individual decisions in domains such as financial services, employment, and housing, and states that language models should not be used to make decisions about individuals or the groups they belong to. Cohere reserves the right to restrict API access at any time for malicious use cases that violate its Usage Guidelines and Terms of Use, and directs users and developers to those separate governing documents for the full enumeration of prohibited use cases.

For an individual using Cohere's platform, this policy means that certain high-risk uses are prohibited outright — including generating content designed to simulate public opinion, producing news or articles intended to manipulate opinion, and using the model's outputs to make important decisions about people without human review. Cohere acknowledges that even with safeguards in place, harmful or toxic outputs can still occur, particularly in extended multi-turn conversations. Users can consult Cohere's Usage Guidelines page, which Cohere explicitly recommends as a resource for understanding how to use the platform responsibly.