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Inside Cohere’s $20 Billion Sovereignty Bet, With Co-Founder Nick Frosst

Earlier this summer, Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst talked to Observer about why sovereign A.I. matters after Anthropic's June shutdown. This week, Cohere signed a merger with Aleph Alpha that values the combined company at $20 billion.

On a Friday afternoon in mid-June, a letter arrived at Anthropic from the U.S. Commerce Department, and by evening, two of the most capable A.I. models on earth had gone dark. The directive, citing national security, barred every foreign national—including the company’s own non-citizen employees—from touching its newest systems, forcing Anthropic to pull Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline all users at once. For most of the industry, it landed as a shock. For Nick Frosst, it was a slide he’d been presenting for years, finally rendered in the one medium the technology business respects: a live outage.

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“It really solidified—made immediate and tangible—what we’ve been saying for a long time,” Frosst told Observer. “If this technology is foundational, and it is, and it’s not deployed under a country’s jurisdiction, that’s a huge risk. A company or a country could just decide to turn off access one day.”

Commerce lifted the controls on June 30, and Anthropic began restoring access the next day.

In 2019, Frosst, Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang co-founded Cohere, the Toronto company now routinely described as Canada’s national A.I. champion. He is the rare frontier-model executive who has spent the boom telling anyone who will listen that the destination everyone is pricing in—artificial general intelligence, the machine that thinks like a person—is not, in his estimation, on the map. Frosst learned the field at the feet of Geoffrey Hinton, who hired him as one of his first researchers at Google Brain in Toronto in 2016. He fronts........

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