Cohere: Command A

The word "open" does less work on this row than it does on most of this catalog's other open-weight releases. Command A's weights are downloadable, but under CC-BY-NC, plus Cohere Labs' Acceptable Use Policy — commercial use is prohibitedsource, accessed 2026-08-29, per the model card for CohereLabs/c4ai-command-a-03-2025. That is not the MIT or Apache terms most of this catalog's other open releases carry: downloading the weights is free, but the licence does not permit building a commercial product on them at all.

The restriction is not attached to a small model, either. Command A publishes at 111Bsource, accessed 2026-08-29, listed 2025-03-13source, accessed 2026-08-29 with a context window of 256000tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 — a full-sized release, not a research checkpoint scoped down to make the non-commercial terms easier to accept.

Nor is the restriction obviously buying this row a price advantage. Command A heads at $2.50per million tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 input, against $0.06per million tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 for DeepSeek's deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 — a model listed more than a year later and licensed under plain MIT with no commercial restriction whatsoever. That is more than an order of magnitude apart, in the permissively licensed row's favour. Each figure is the top listed provider's rate for its row rather than necessarily the vendor's own, and the permissive licence is exactly what lets anyone else host those weights and quote a price for them at all. A non-commercial licence is a harder sell on a model that costs more to call than a permissively licensed rival, not less.