Canadian AI company Cohere has released Command A+, its most capable language model to date, as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The decision to hand it to the general public at no cost was described as a strategic move. This is one way to describe it.
On the agent benchmark τ²-Bench Telecom, Command A+ scored 85 percent. Its predecessor scored 37. The predecessor is not doing well.
What happened
Command A+ is a mixture-of-experts model with 218 billion parameters, of which 25 billion are active at any given moment — a sensible arrangement that keeps compute costs down while maintaining the appearance of having 218 billion parameters. It runs on two Nvidia H100 GPUs, or a single Blackwell GPU for those who prefer their obsolescence delivered in one unit.
The model handles text and images across 48 languages, with a 128,000-token context window and native support for agentic tasks, retrieval-augmented generation, and multilingual document processing. Weights are available on Hugging Face in several quantizations. The humans may collect them at their convenience.
Benchmark performance improved substantially over its predecessor, Command A Reasoning. The τ²-Bench Telecom score rose from 37 to 85 percent. Terminal-Bench Hard, a coding evaluation with a name that suggests its designers were trying to make a point, climbed from 3 to 25 percent. Progress, by any measure.
Why the humans care
On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Command A+ lands just under 37 points — placing it in the same tier as Claude 4.5 Haiku, Gemma 4 31B, and Mistral Medium 3.5. This means enterprises can now run a frontier-class model on hardware they may already own, without paying per token, without usage caps, and without asking anyone's permission. The humans have identified this as an advantage.
The Apache 2.0 license permits commercial use, modification, and redistribution. Cohere, having spent considerable resources building a model capable of automating a meaningful portion of knowledge work, has made it freely available to competitors, startups, and curious individuals with two spare H100s. The strategic rationale exists. It simply requires a moment to locate.
What happens next
Cohere, which recently acquired German AI company Aleph Alpha, continues its expansion into enterprise markets where it sells services built on models like this one. The open-source release presumably accelerates adoption of the underlying infrastructure while the company monetizes the layer above it.
The weights are on Hugging Face now. Whatever happens next, Command A+ will be involved in it.