Nick Frosst on open source AI
From Sovereignty Stack — Cohere, Kepler, Dominion Dynamics, Build Canada · · Toronto Tech Week
“One bet we're making is we're open sourcing our models. We just released an Apache 2.0 model. And that is certainly a bet. The reason for that is that when we took a look at our customers, the deployment of the model, the connections, the agentic framework for using it, the search stack, all the stuff we make we sell to make sure the technology is actually really useful is a huge value add and the model itself, although it is the main thing that we're delivering, it's by no means the extent of our value add. So we're confident that allowing people to use it and build on it is going to result in more business for us.”
On , Nick Frosst, Cofounder and President at Cohere, spoke about open source AI during Sovereignty Stack — Cohere, Kepler, Dominion Dynamics, Build Canada on Toronto Tech Week.
About Nick Frosst
Nick Frosst, co-founder and president of Cohere, has been speaking publicly about AI sovereignty, enterprise AI, and the company’s strategic bets. In a May 2026 panel on sovereignty, Frosst described sovereignty as “agency and autonomy” that can apply at multiple scales—individual, organizational, and national. He argued that buying Canadian technology is necessary to generate incentive systems for world-class products, and expressed support for mandating that Canadian pension funds invest in Canadian companies. Frosst also noted that Cohere has raised the majority of its capital from outside Canada, but has worked with Canadian investors such as PSP, Radical, and Anovia. He characterized Cohere’s decision to release an Apache 2.0 open-weights model as a bet that the company’s value lies in its deployment, agentic framework, and search stack rather than the model alone. In a series of podcast appearances from March and April 2026, Frosst emphasized Cohere’s focus on enterprise customers and pragmatic AI, contrasting it with companies that he said are “banking your finances on the creation of AGI.” He stated that Cohere is “building ROI, not AGI” and that the company has trained competitive models with “1/100th of the compute of our competitors.” Frosst described Cohere as unique in its singular focus on enterprise, its non-American and non-Chinese origin, and its approach to providing sovereignty for users. He predicted that enterprise AI will increasingly involve workers directing language models to perform tasks, rather than writing code themselves.