Building Trust In Ai Coheres Approach To Ai Governance

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Dec 10, 2025

7 minutes read

Building trust in AI: Cohere’s approach to AI governance

Cohere’s AI governance frameworks, practices, and policies direct and guide the responsible development and use of our AI models and systems.

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As a leading provider of enterprise AI solutions, Cohere delivers the technology foundation that powers countless enterprise AI applications and products. And that foundation needs to be trustworthy. Trust, built upon security, safety, transparency, reliability, accountability, and state of the art research, enables our customers to innovate with confidence and accelerate their AI deployments.

##### Overview

Cohere’s approach to AI governance includes frameworks, practices, and policies that direct and guide the responsible development and use of our AI models and systems. This includes providing our customers with the information they need to deploy and build high trust enterprise AI solutions on top of those models and systems.

Cohere’s AI governance approach is aligned with and certified under ISO/IEC 42001, which ensures systematic and ongoing risk management of AI systems, robust governance practices that are regularly reviewed, and external validation steps.

Our approach is also driven by international voluntary standards for AI developers, which provide principles-based frameworks that foster harmonization and trust across the AI industry. Since 2023, Cohere has signed onto several voluntary commitments and frameworks for AI governance, including:

• The Seoul Frontier AI Safety Commitments and the Seoul AI Business Pledge
• Canada’s Voluntary Code of Conduct on the Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI Systems
• The EU AI Act’s voluntary General-Purpose AI Code of Practice for general-purpose AI models and AI Pact

We also contribute to and align our approach with other leading frameworks for AI governance,  including America’s AI Action Plan and the Hiroshima Process International Code of Conduct for Organizations Developing Advanced AI Systems.

##### Cohere’s AI governance practices

Our governance practices are organized around the following core pillars of trust: Transparency and Explainability; Security and Data Protection; Safety; Enterprise Performance, Reliability, and Efficiency; Accountability; and Advancing the State of the Art.

###### Transparency and Explainability

Cohere develops, publishes, and maintains a range of documentation that provides information to our customers, the research community, and the wider public about how we build our AI products and how they can be deployed responsibly. We also build features into our AI solutions that ensure AI outputs can be explained and understood.

Our transparency and explainability publications and practices include:

• Our **Secure AI Frontier Model Framework** outlines our practices and protocols for identifying, testing, and mitigating risks throughout the model development lifecycle. This framework is aligned with multiple industry commitments, including the 2024 Seoul Frontier AI Safety Commitments.
• **Model cards** and **technical reports**, and many other resources on Cohere’s documentation website, describe our models' capabilities, evaluation results, configurable safety features, limitations, and more. This enables our customers and other external stakeholders to understand the design and characteristics of our models, supporting transparency, explainability, and responsible use.
• Policies outline the acceptable use of our models.
• Built-in features in our AI models and **North** , our end-to-end AI platform, enhance transparency and explainability. This includes citing the sources on which specific outputs are based, and providing users with a  description of the steps followed by an AI agent to generate an output in response to a user’s input.  These features empower users to verify how the AI system generated a particular output and what steps and user-connected systems or sources were used to get there.

###### Security and Data Protection

As the leading security-first AI model developer, Cohere advances best practices in AI security and data protection in the enterprise space. This includes adhering to a range of industry standards and certifications for trust, security, and data protection that are important to our customers, such as:

• **ISO 42001**: Developed and certified by the International Standards Organization, ISO/IEC 42001 is the world’s first AI management system standard. It requires organizations to demonstrate rigorous governance and transparency standards to effectively identify and manage the potential risks of AI systems.
• **ISO 27001**: This is an internationally...