“We’re confident that allowing people to use it and build on it is going to result in more business for us,” co-founder Nick Frosst said at the Toronto Tech Week Homecoming event. Cohere can instead make money by selling things that make the technology “really useful,” like installation services, connectors to other software systems, and search tools. (The Logic)

Talking point: Last week, Cohere released Command A+, its most capable model yet, and its first that’s fully open source, meaning anyone can download, use and modify it for free. Clients still pay for access if they want to use it on Cohere’s infrastructure. Cohere increasingly focused on selling tools that make the underlying AI useful to businesses, like its North agent-builder system. Paris-headquartered Mistral AI has made a similar bet, open-sourcing its models and charging clients for customization services and tools on top of them. Both firms are focused on the sovereign AI market, where the ability to control the technology is a selling point. U.S. tech giants like OpenAI and Meta, by contrast, have increasingly clammed up.