Cohere releases Command A+ as an Apache 2.0 open model

Background

Cohere had earlier published Command models with non-commercial weights. Command A+ was the first Command model to carry the Apache 2.0 licence, a permissive open-source licence that allows commercial use ^[1].

What happened

On 20 May 2026 Cohere released Command A+, an open-source mixture-of-experts model under the Apache 2.0 licence ^[1]. Cohere aimed it at sovereign and critical-infrastructure deployments, where an organisation keeps its systems and data under its own control ^[1].

Key details

The model has 218 billion total parameters, of which 25 billion are active per token ^[2]. It handles text and image input, supports reasoning and covers 48 languages ^[2]. In the quantised W4A4 version, a single B200 or two H100 GPUs can run it ^[2].

It has a 128k-token context and can produce up to 64k tokens of output ^[2].

Impact

The release gave organisations that need to run AI on their own infrastructure a large open-weight model under a licence that permits commercial use. Cohere's earlier models had been restricted to non-commercial use, so the change in licence was the main shift in how the model could be used ^[1].