Cohere Releases Command A+ — A 218B Parameter Open-Source MoE Model Built for Sovereign Critical Infrastructure

Summary

Cohere has released Command A+, a powerful open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model under an Apache 2.0 license, purpose-built for sovereign critical infrastructure. The model spans 218 billion parameters but activates only 25 billion per prompt, enabling high-performance inference on as few as two H100 GPUs or a single B200 GPU.

Command A+ is designed to address growing concerns around AI sovereignty — the ability of governments and regulated industries to deploy AI systems they fully control, rather than depending on cloud-hosted models from a handful of providers. The model supports 48 languages, including all official EU languages, and can be deployed on-premises, in VPCs, or in fully air-gapped environments.

“The world is building its future on AI systems that offer no guarantee of control,” said Nick Frosst, Co-founder of Cohere. The model is optimized for enterprise workloads including complex RAG pipelines, multi-step SQL generation, and financial document analysis, with multimodal capabilities for processing charts, PDFs, slides, and reports.

Source

Las Vegas Sun · Cohere

Commentary

Cohere is making a smart strategic play here. While OpenAI and Anthropic dominate the cloud-hosted frontier model market, Cohere is carving out the sovereignty niche — and it’s a big one. With the EU AI Act now in effect and governments worldwide increasingly uncomfortable with their critical AI infrastructure running on American cloud platforms, a high-quality open-weight model that can run air-gapped is exactly what procurement offices are looking for.

The technical specs are impressive: 218B total parameters with only 25B active per prompt is an excellent efficiency ratio, and running on two H100s puts this within reach of most enterprise and government data centers. The Apache 2.0 license removes commercial friction entirely. Whether Command A+ can match frontier closed models on raw capability remains to be seen, but for organizations where data residency and control are non-negotiable, this might be the most practical option available today.