Cohere is one of the most well-known AI startups outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, with a valuation of $5.5 billion as of July. It was co-founded by the authors of the paper “Attending Is All You Need,” which helped launch the Large-Scale Language Model (LLM) revolution.
Toronto and San Francisco-based Cohere sells AI to enterprise customers and doesn't have a viral consumer chatbot. Anthropic made headlines last month for its deal with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers, and TechCrunch has learned that Palantir is also a Cohere partner. And, according to information explained in a video posted by Palantir, Cohere's model is already being used by various anonymous Palantir customers.
This video is from a presentation held in November 2024 at Palantir's first developer conference, DevCon1. Cohere engineer and former Palantir employee Billy Trend said this shows Cohere is “already rolling out to Palantir customers.”
“This is why I'm really excited about working with Palantir. We're going to provide a lot of details about how we can serve our customers,” Trend said during the presentation. Ta.
In the video, Trend mainly focused on technical details. Although he did not name specific Palantir customers, Trend said Cohere's AI was used by Palantir customers who have “very tight constraints” on where their data is stored and want to be able to make inferences in Arabic. He mentioned an example in which the system was introduced. “It's a great opportunity for Cohere because that's what we're good at,” he said.
According to Trend, Palantir customers will be able to access Cohere's latest AI models through a “compute module” within Foundry. It should be noted that one of Palantir's flagship platforms, Foundry, is more geared towards commercial customers, whereas Palantir's other older flagship platform, Gotham, is designed for defense and intelligence agencies. Palantir explains that there is. So we don't know which organizations are using Cohere through Palantir, but this suggests it could be an enterprise.
Palantir works with all kinds of giants, such as Airbus. But the company has also been vocal about working closely with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, recently releasing a manifesto on how to rebuild the defense technology sector.
Cohere has touted partnerships with big technology companies like Fujitsu, but has remained silent about its deal with Palantir, according to reviews and announcements on its website.
TechCrunch asked Cohere if it could specify whether its AI is used for military or intelligence-related use cases and what Cohere's general policy is for these types of deployments. Kohia declined to comment.
Palantir did not immediately comment. OpenAI is also used in the defense technology field, and there was news earlier this month that it had signed a contract with Anduril.