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Command A

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Command A is an open-weights enterprise model from Cohere built for tool use, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multilingual tasks across a context window of 256K tokens.

Tool Use
index.ts
import { streamText } from 'ai'


const result = streamText({
  model: 'cohere/command-a',
  prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?'
})

What To Consider When Choosing a Provider

  • Configuration: For enterprise deployments across regions or language markets, confirm your provider choice meets data residency needs. Command A lists 23 training languages, so residency and language policy still matter.
  • Zero Data Retention: AI Gateway does not currently support Zero Data Retention for this model. See the documentation for models that support ZDR.
  • Authentication: AI Gateway authenticates requests using an API key or OIDC token. You do not need to manage provider credentials directly.

When to Use Command A

Best For

  • Multi-step ReAct agents: Tool use and decision chaining spanning many turns
  • Large-corpus RAG: Context window of 256K tokens fits retrieval results, source documents, and instructions in one prompt
  • Multilingual applications: Single model covers any of the 23 supported training languages without separate regional variants
  • Citation workflows: Legal review, regulatory compliance, and research summarization where traceable sourcing is required
  • High-throughput production: Higher throughput than Command R+ 08-2024 cuts infrastructure cost at scale

Consider Alternatives When

  • Creative generation focus: Workload centers on open-ended conversation rather than structured enterprise tasks
  • Reasoning specialist needed: Mathematical or formal logic chains need a reasoning-tuned model
  • Smaller context suffices: A smaller model would reduce per-token cost at your volume
  • Unsupported language: Your target language falls outside the 23 supported languages

Conclusion

Command A targets enterprise teams that need an open-weights foundation for agent systems, multilingual deployments, and retrieval-heavy pipelines with unified billing through AI Gateway. It brings a context of 256K tokens, 23-language training coverage, and the throughput gains Cohere cites over Command R+ 08-2024.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • What is Command A's hybrid attention architecture?

    It combines three sliding-window attention layers (4,096-token window each) with one global attention layer that has no positional constraint. The sliding windows handle local context efficiently. The global layer models long-range dependencies across the full context window of 256K tokens.

  • How does Command A compare to Command R+ 08-2024?

    Command A delivers higher throughput than Command R+ 08-2024. Cohere positions it as the successor tuned for agentic performance and enterprise task execution.

  • Which languages does Command A support?

    23 languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Dutch, Czech, Indonesian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Greek, Hindi, Hebrew, and Persian.

  • Does Command A support citation generation natively?

    Yes. Citation generation is a built-in feature, so you can ground outputs in retrieved or cited sources without bolting on a separate citation stack.

  • What is the knowledge cutoff date for Command A?

    June 2024.

  • Is Command A open-weights?

    Yes. Cohere released it as an open-weights model. On Hugging Face it lives under CohereLabs/c4ai-command-a-03-2025.

  • How much does Command A cost on AI Gateway?

    See the pricing section on this page for today's rates. AI Gateway exposes each provider's pricing for Command A.