Tier 2 Restricted open-weight
What the publisher claims: open weights
The one-liner: Research-grade open weights that are explicitly non-commercial.
The six questions
weights downloadable once the gate is accepted
non-commercial restriction and an incorporated acceptable use policy
runs via Transformers and standard serving stacks
architecture, data categories, post-training method and evaluations described; corpus not published
no corpus or recipe
Cohere Labs runs a real open-science community — 4,500 members across 150 countries, a Research Scholars programme, and community fine-tuning challenges that fed Aya — with public repos taking outside PRs, though every Command A and Command R development decision stays inside Cohere.
License
CC-BY-NC 4.0 with Cohere Labs Acceptable Use Addendum (c4ai-cc-by-nc-license on Command R; CC-BY-NC-4.0 tag on Command A and Aya) — license source ↗
- non-commercial only
- Cohere Labs Acceptable Use Policy incorporated by reference
- gated repositories requiring accepting the license agreement
- use-based prohibited-use list
What is actually released
- weights (Command A 03-2025 111B, Command R7B/R8B, Aya Expanse 8B/32B)
- model cards
- tech reports
- evaluation information; no training data
Why it matters
The clearest corporate example of research-only openness: usable, deployable, and legally closed to commercial use.
Sources
- https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/c4ai-command-a-03-2025
- https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/c4ai-command-r7b-12-2024
- https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/aya-expanse-32b
- https://cohere.com/c4ai-cc-by-nc-license
Derived from the openness dataset behind But Is It Open? — snapshot 2026-11-07 ↗. Scores are qualitative readings of the cited evidence, not verdicts; tier measures openness, not intelligence.