Cohere open-sources Command A+, its most powerful model: why it matters for developers

Cohere on May 21, 2026 released Command A+, its most powerful language model, as open‑source under the Apache 2.0 license. The company describes Command A+ as a major offering because it combines high parameter scale with multimodal and long‑context capabilities, and its open licensing makes the model and related assets available to developers and researchers. Command A+ is built as a mixture‑of‑experts model with 218 billion total parameters and 25 billion active parameters. It supports both text and images, understands 48 languages, and offers an exceptionally large 128,000‑token context window — capabilities aimed at handling complex, multilingual and long‑form inputs without splitting them into many smaller segments.

The model’s hardware profile is explicitly demanding: Cohere says Command A+ can be run on two NVIDIA H100 GPUs or on a single Blackwell GPU. Those requirements signal that, while the model is open‑source, practical deployment or experimentation at full scale will still need significant compute resources. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Command A+ is now available for redistribution and reuse within that permissive open‑source framework. Reported May 21, 2026, the release preserves Cohere’s stated technical parameters and deployment notes while broadening public access to a high‑capacity, multimodal model.