Cohere introduced Command A on 13 March 2025 and Command A+ on 20 May 2026. They belong to an enterprise-oriented family focused on retrieval, tool orchestration and multilingual work rather than consumer-chat branding. The exact strings command-a-03-2025 and command-a-plus-05-2026 identify different releases and capability envelopes.
Command A in practice
Cohere’s March 2025 release specifies 111B parameters and a 256K context window for Command A, describing retrieval-augmented generation and tool use as primary targets. In a RAG deployment, compare retrieval quality, citation accuracy, grounding and abstention separately. A model cannot repair missing documents: the retrieval index, chunking, permissions and update cadence are equally important.
What changed with A+
The May 2026 release describes A+ as a mixture-of-experts model with 25B active and 218B total parameters, image inputs and support for 48 languages. That is a vendor-stated feature inventory, not a license to claim independent superiority. The published reference lists a distinct 128K context for A+, so it would be wrong to copy A’s 256K figure into A+ merely because the name appears upgraded.
Choice architecture
Measure whether image inputs are necessary; otherwise a text-focused system can be simpler and easier to audit. For multinational operations, build a language matrix with evaluated sample counts rather than assuming parity across all 48 claimed languages. Security reviews should cover document-level ACL filtering and whether embeddings or retrieved content leave the approved processing boundary.
Where to get the model
Cohere documents its native platform and some third-party deployment options, but these can have platform-specific model IDs. Never assume a model listed for one cloud is accessible in another region or tier. Keep the same canonical provider release connected to separate deployment records.
What to verify before adopting this model or method
Use the exact release ID and API endpoint; confirm your geographic processing location, entitlement tier, model lifecycle, feature flags, context and output limits from the provider console. Run a reproducible evaluation on your own data and retain human oversight for consequential actions. Where a specification, price, commercial license or entitlement is not verified for your deployment, this article deliberately leaves it unasserted instead of filling a plausible number.
Sources & Further Reading
- docs.cohere.com — documentation/reference (supplier-provided reference; not independently checked in this pass)
- docs.cohere.com — documentation/reference (supplier-provided reference; not independently checked in this pass)
- docs.cohere.com — documentation/reference (supplier-provided reference; not independently checked in this pass)
Source documentation establishes vendor-published facts, not independently measured model quality, tenant access, contractual rights or current prices. Use a dated pricing ledger and an account-specific entitlement check for deployment decisions.