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Cohere Command A

Command A is Cohere's flagship enterprise language model, built with a heavy emphasis on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool use, and multilingual enterprise search rather than general consumer chat. It ranks around #16 in real-world usage share (roughly 0.8%), reflecting its focused enterprise niche rather than mass adoption. Command A is best known for pairing tightly with Cohere's own Embed and Rerank models to power search and knowledge-base products inside large organizations.

Quick facts
Made by: Cohere
Access: Proprietary — usage-based API (Cohere platform), plus deployable via Bedrock, SageMaker, Azure, and on-prem for enterprise customers
Context window: 256,000 tokens
Strengths: RAG grounding with citations, strong multilingual coverage (23+ languages), tool/function calling, efficient serving (runs on 2 GPUs)
Primary use case: Enterprise search, knowledge-base Q&A, and RAG-driven customer support agents

Jump to: Example Getting started Best for

Example

Cohere's official Python SDK exposes a chat method that supports grounded generation with source documents for RAG use cases.

import cohere

co = cohere.ClientV2(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")

response = co.chat(
    model="command-a-03-2025",
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Explain what a REST API is in two sentences."}
    ]
)

print(response.message.content[0].text)

Getting started

Cohere offers a free trial API key for evaluation before moving to a paid production key.

# 1. sign up for a free trial key at dashboard.cohere.com

# 2. install the SDK
pip install cohere

# 3. set your key and call co.chat() as shown above
export COHERE_API_KEY="your-key-here"

Best for: Enterprise teams building search or support tools that must ground answers in a private document set with citations — Command A's tight integration with Cohere's embeddings and reranker makes it a strong fit for RAG pipelines rather than open-ended consumer chat.