Cohere Command R

Command R, released on 11 March 2024, was Cohere's attempt to define a middle class of language models. The company called it the "scalable" tier: strong enough for production, cheap enough that a business could move past a proof of concept without rewriting its budget. At 35 billion parameters it was far smaller than the frontier models of its day, and that was the point. Two features carried the model. The first was retrieval-augmented generation with inline citations — the model answers from a supplied set of documents and marks which document each claim came from, which is what an enterprise legal or support team needs before it will let a model near a customer. The second was tool use: the model returns a JSON list of tool calls, in a single step, which was enough to build the first generation of business automations. It handled ten languages well — English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Arabic — with pre-training data for thirteen more, and offered a 128,000-token context window at a time when many competitors were still at 8,000 or 32,000. Cohere charged 0.50 dollars per million input tokens and 1.50 dollars per million output. The weights went to Hugging Face under CC BY-NC 4.0, free to download and study but not to deploy commercially. Cohere deprecated the model on 15 September 2025 together with Command R+, Command and Command-light, and retired fine-tuning for it at the same time. As of August 2026 the company has not announced a shutdown date, so existing users keep access — but nobody new can buy it.

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