Cohere open-sources its strongest model yet

2026-05-21 · Source: The Decoder · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning · Depth: Intermediate, quick

Summary

Cohere has open-sourced its most powerful language model, Command A+, under the Apache 2.0 license. This mixture-of-experts model features 218 billion parameters with 25 billion active and is designed for enterprise applications such as agentic tasks, RAG, and multilingual document processing. Command A+ supports 48 languages, handles both text and images, and boasts a 128,000-token context window. It demonstrates significant performance gains over its predecessor, Command A Reasoning, with scores jumping from 37% to 85% on τ²-Bench Telecom and from 3% to 25% on Terminal-Bench Hard. The model achieves nearly 37 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, comparable to Claude 4.5 Haiku, Gemma 4 31B, and Mistral Medium 3.5. Its weights are available on Hugging Face in various quantizations, and it runs on two Nvidia H100 GPUs or a single Blackwell GPU.

Key takeaway

For AI Engineers evaluating large language models for enterprise deployment, Command A+ offers a compelling open-source option. Its 218 billion parameters and 128,000-token context window suit complex agentic tasks and multilingual RAG. You should assess its strong benchmark performance on τ²-Bench Telecom and Terminal-Bench Hard. Consider its compatibility with Nvidia H100 or Blackwell GPUs for your next project.

Key insights

Cohere's Command A+ is a powerful, open-source MoE model designed for enterprise AI, offering strong performance and broad language support.

In practice

• Implement agentic tasks.
• Enhance RAG systems.
• Process multilingual documents.

Topics

• Cohere
• Command A+
• Mixture-of-Experts
• Large Language Models
• Enterprise AI
• RAG Systems

Best for: AI Architect, NLP Engineer, CTO, AI Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, Director of AI/ML

Related on AIssential

• Introducing Command A+: Making sovereign agentic capabilities available to all - Cohere — Cohere's Command A+ democratizes enterprise-grade agentic AI through an efficient, open-source MoE model.
• Introducing Cohere Command A+ in Foundry — Cohere Command A+ in Microsoft Foundry unifies diverse AI capabilities for complex enterprise agentic workflows.
• Enterprise AI Models - Cohere — Cohere provides a diverse portfolio of enterprise AI models optimized for multilingual, multimodal, and efficient private deployment.
• Cohere open-sources a coding agent that runs on a single H100 — Cohere's North Mini Code offers an open-source, locally deployable MoE coding agent for complex software engineering tasks.
• Cohere Command A+ Now Available in Microsoft Foundry — Command A+ offers enterprise-grade agentic AI with high efficiency and managed deployment flexibility via Microsoft Foundry.
• Latest open artifacts (#18): Arcee's 400B MoE, LiquidAI's underrated 1B model, new Kimi, and anticipation of a busy month — Smaller open models are achieving competitive performance against larger counterparts through extensive pretraining and architectural innovations.

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by The Decoder.