Cohere Usage Policy

Cohere's Usage Policy sets out what customers are and are not allowed to do with Cohere's AI Services. It bans a wide range of harmful uses—such as making automated decisions about people's rights or safety, creating fake content about real people, generating child sexual abuse material, and enabling cyberattacks. If you build a product on top of Cohere, you must pass these rules down to your own users, tell them they are talking to an AI, and Cohere can cut off your access if you break the rules.

This document establishes Cohere's acceptable use framework for its Services, imposing a set of absolute prohibitions and affirmative obligations on customers. Absolute prohibitions cover high-stakes automated decision-making affecting individual rights or access to essential services, child exploitation and child sexual abuse material, generation of deceptive synthetic content about real persons or entities, life-safety and critical-infrastructure applications where Service failure could cause death or severe harm, incitement of violence or terrorism, creation or promotion of harmful misinformation and disinformation, privacy violations including unlawful location tracking and real-time identification, and unauthorized access to computer systems. Affirmative obligations require customers to comply with Universal Requirements, impose substantially similar obligations on their end users, disclose AI system identity in public-facing interactive applications, and implement child safety controls—including age verification and content moderation—where their applications interact with minors. Cohere retains the right to restrict, suspend, or terminate access upon learning of a violation, misuse, or abuse.

For individuals who encounter an application built on Cohere's Services, the policy requires that the operator disclose when they are interacting with an AI system rather than a human. The policy also bars operators from using Cohere to make automated decisions about individuals' rights, safety, or access to essential services and benefits, and prohibits operators from using Cohere to track users' locations unlawfully, score them socially, or identify them in real time. Customers whose applications interact with minors must implement safety controls such as age verification and content moderation. If a user believes an operator is violating these rules, Cohere is entitled to restrict, suspend, or terminate that operator's access upon learning of the violation.