A fabricated quote becomes a trademark claim

The Atlantic, Forbes and The Guardian were among fourteen publishers, including Condé Nast, that sued the AI company Cohere, Inc. in February 2025, alleging it used their copyrighted articles to train its AI models and that the system’s hallucinations falsely attribute fabricated content to legitimate publishers, according to a year-end review of AI intellectual-property disputes published by the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. The suit combines two separate complaints: that Cohere trained its models on the publishers’ journalism without permission, and that the resulting system then invented quotes and articles it credited to their mastheads.

That second charge is the more unusual one. Most AI copyright suits turn on whether ingesting protected text to train a model counts as fair use, a question on which courts have split, with one judge analogising AI training to how a person learns and another ruling that the fair-use question could be resolved at summary judgment. The publishers suing Cohere are arguing something different: that a fabricated attribution is itself an injury, closer to a false endorsement than to straightforward copying.

A hallucination with a byline attached is a claim about who said something, made without that person’s consent.

If that framing holds, liability would turn less on what a model absorbed during training and more on what it later invents and puts a real name to. For publishers whose entire asset is the trustworthiness of their name, that distinction may matter more than the copying question courts have spent most of 2025 arguing over.