--- source: 'https://howaiworks.ai/models/command' section: models title: Command A+ description: >- Cohere's first Mixture-of-Experts model, released May 2026. 218B total / 25B active parameters, vision input, reasoning, and agentic tool use under Apache 2.0. tags: - Cohere - Command - Language Model - Enterprise AI - Agentic AI - Multilingual - Mixture-of-Experts - Open Weights - Latest category: Language Models developer: Cohere developerWebsite: 'https://cohere.com/' modelType: Mixture-of-Experts Language Model releaseDate: '2026-05-20' lastUpdated: '2026-07-08' license: Apache 2.0 contextWindow: 128K tokens knowledgeCutoff: 'April 1, 2025' officialWebsite: 'https://cohere.com/command' docsPage: 'https://docs.cohere.com/docs/command-a-plus' pricingPage: 'https://cohere.com/pricing' --- # Command A+ > Cohere's first Mixture-of-Experts model, released May 2026. 218B total / 25B active parameters, vision input, reasoning, and agentic tool use under Apache 2.0. ## Overview **Command A+** is Cohere's enterprise flagship, released on **May 20, 2026**. It is the company's first [Mixture-of-Experts](https://howaiworks.ai/glossary/mixture-of-experts) model — 218 billion total parameters with 25 billion active per token — and the first Command model to fold vision input, reasoning, agentic tool use, and translation into a single set of weights. Cohere positions it as "the last model in the Command A family, while being Cohere's first Mixture of Experts model." The design goal is deployability: Command A+ fits on **1× NVIDIA B200** or **2× H100s** at W4A4 quantization, which is what makes a 218B-parameter model practical for on-premises and VPC deployments. It is released under **Apache 2.0**, with weights published by Cohere Labs on Hugging Face. > **A note on naming**: Cohere has never released a model called "Command 2.0," and has never used an `N.0` numbering scheme for the Command family. The real lineage is Command → Command R → Command R+ → Command A → Command A+. ## Capabilities - **Sparse MoE efficiency**: 218B total parameters, 25B active. Cohere reports up to **63% higher output tokens per second** and up to **17% lower time to first token** versus Command A Reasoning at the same quantization and concurrency. - **Native vision input**: Accepts text and images; outputs text, reasoning, and tool calls. - **Configurable reasoning**: Thinking can be enabled or disabled per request, with a token budget to cap reasoning spend before the final response. - **Agentic tool use**: Tuned for multi-step tool orchestration; served through Cohere's Chat endpoint. - **48 languages**: Coverage expanded from 23 to 48 languages, including all official EU languages, with a more efficient tokenizer for Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. - **Translation**: Cohere reports gains in machine translation and multilingual reasoning, and names WMT24++ as the public benchmark it evaluated with xCOMET-XL. It publishes no numeric translation score. ## Technical Specifications - **API model ID**: `command-a-plus-05-2026` - **Architecture**: Sparse [Mixture-of-Experts](https://howaiworks.ai/glossary/mixture-of-experts) — Cohere's first - **Parameters**: 218B total / 25B active per token - **[Context window](https://howaiworks.ai/glossary/context-window)**: 128K tokens - **Max output**: 64K tokens - **Input modalities**: Text, image - **Output modalities**: Text (Cohere's model card lists text only; reasoning traces and tool calls are surfaced as structured fields on the Chat response) - **Knowledge cutoff**: April 1, 2025 - **Languages**: 48 - **License**: Apache 2.0 (open weights) - **Deployment footprint**: 1× B200 @ W4A4, or 2× H100 @ W4A4 - **Endpoint**: Chat ### Weights Published by Cohere Labs on Hugging Face. The headline checkpoint is [`CohereLabs/command-a-plus-05-2026-w4a4`](https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/command-a-plus-05-2026-w4a4); BF16 and FP8 variants are also available. ### Relationship to Command A `command-a-03-2025` remains live alongside Command A+. The two are not strictly ordered: Command A+ is faster, stronger on reasoning and agentic work, and multimodal, but it has a **smaller context window** — 128K versus Command A's 256K. Command A, in turn, caps generation at 8K tokens where Command A+ allows 64K. Pick by whether your workload is bounded by input length or by reasoning depth. ## Use Cases - **Enterprise agents**: Multi-step workflows across internal tools, where tool-call reliability matters more than raw context length. - **Private and on-premises deployment**: Apache 2.0 weights on a single B200 make air-gapped and VPC deployments tractable. - **Retrieval-augmented generation**: Grounded question answering over enterprise document sets, a long-standing focus of the Command line. - **Multilingual operations**: Support, translation, and document processing across 48 languages, including full EU-language coverage for European deployments. - **Document and chart understanding**: Vision input for scanned documents, screenshots, and figures. - **Agentic coding**: Terminal-driven software tasks, where Cohere reports the largest generational jump. ## Performance / Benchmarks All figures below are **reported by Cohere** in the Command A+ announcement. Note that Cohere uses two different baselines depending on the benchmark — agentic results are measured against Command A Reasoning, multimodal results against Command A Vision. Conflating them overstates the multimodal gain. **Agentic** (baseline: Command A Reasoning) | Benchmark | Command A+ | Command A Reasoning | |---|---|---| | τ²-Bench Telecom | 85% | 37% | | Terminal-Bench Hard | 25% | 3% | **Multimodal** (baseline: Command A Vision) | Benchmark | Command A+ | Command A Vision | |---|---|---| | MMMU | 75.1% | 65.3% | | MathVista | 80.6% | 73.5% | | CharXiv Reasoning | 52.7% | 46.9% | | MMMU Pro | 63% | — | Cohere also reports a score of **37 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index** (a third-party aggregate), stating that this outperforms other leading open models. That figure is a launch-day number: Artificial Analysis's own article of May 20, 2026 says Command A+ "achieves 37 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index" and names no index version. Artificial Analysis's live model page now reads **"Command A+ scores 23 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index,"** under **Intelligence Index v4.1** — dated "June 2026—current" in Artificial Analysis's version history, and therefore published after Cohere's May 20 launch. It aggregates nine evaluations — GDPval-AA v2, 𝜏³-Banking, Terminal-Bench v2.1, SciCode, Humanity's Last Exam, GPQA Diamond, CritPt, AA-Omniscience, and AA-LCR. The two numbers come from different index versions and are not comparable, so 37 should not be quoted as a current score. On efficiency, at matched quantization and concurrency Cohere measures **up to 63% higher output tokens per second** and **up to 17% lower time to first token** relative to Command A Reasoning. For translation, Cohere names **WMT24++** as its public benchmark, evaluated with xCOMET-XL. It reports no numeric score, so none is given here. ## Limitations - **Smaller context than Command A**: 128K versus 256K tokens. Workloads that depend on very long single-prompt inputs may still be better served by `command-a-03-2025`. - **No published token pricing**: Cohere lists no per-token rate for Command A+. It is free until rate limits, after which capacity is bought as Model Vault instances rather than per token — which makes cost forecasting a capacity-planning exercise, not a token-count one. - **Rate limits are the real ceiling**: Because the free tier is bounded by rate limits rather than by spend, throughput planning matters more here than with a metered API. - **Hardware floor**: Even at W4A4, a B200 or a pair of H100s is the entry point for self-hosting. This is not a laptop model. - **Knowledge cutoff of April 1, 2025**: Over a year stale as of mid-2026; pair with retrieval or web search for current information. - **Final model in its family**: Cohere describes A+ as the last Command A model, so future improvements will presumably arrive under a new family name. ## Pricing & Access Cohere has **not published per-token pricing** for Command A+, and the model is not metered that way. Its documentation states that "for both trial keys and production keys, Command A+ is free until rate limits are reached." Past those limits, production runs on **Model Vault**, Cohere's dedicated managed deployment, whose hourly and monthly instance rates appear on the public [pricing page](https://cohere.com/pricing) — that page's per-token table covers only legacy models (Command, Command R, Command R+, Aya Expanse). Access paths: - **Cohere API** — Chat endpoint, model ID `command-a-plus-05-2026`; free until rate limits on trial and production keys alike - **Model Vault** — Cohere's dedicated managed deployment, and the documented path to production beyond rate limits - **Hugging Face** — Apache 2.0 weights for self-hosting, plus a free trial Space - **Oracle OCI** — Cohere's multi-cloud docs use `command-a-plus-05-2026` in their OCI example - **Azure AI Foundry** — available via Microsoft's model catalog - **Self-hosted** — 1× B200 or 2× H100 at W4A4 Because the weights are Apache 2.0, self-hosting carries no licensing fee. ## Ecosystem & Tools - **[Cohere North](https://cohere.com/north)**: Cohere's enterprise AI platform, where Command models power agentic workflows over internal data. - **[Cohere Toolkit](https://github.com/cohere-ai/cohere-toolkit)**: Open-source templates for building RAG and agent applications on Command models. - **[Cohere SDKs](https://docs.cohere.com/)**: Official Python, TypeScript, Java, and Go clients for the Chat endpoint. - **[Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/command-a-plus-05-2026-w4a4)**: Open weights, quantized variants, and a hosted demo Space. - **Azure AI Foundry**: Managed hosting for the W4A4 checkpoint. ## Community & Resources - [Introducing Command A+](https://cohere.com/blog/command-a-plus) - Official announcement with full benchmark tables - [Command A+ Documentation](https://docs.cohere.com/docs/command-a-plus) - [Cohere Models Overview](https://docs.cohere.com/docs/models) - Live model IDs, context windows, and deprecation schedule - [Command Product Page](https://cohere.com/command) - [Command A+ on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/command-a-plus-05-2026-w4a4) - [Cohere Pricing](https://cohere.com/pricing) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### When was Command A+ released? Command A+ was released on May 20, 2026. Its API model ID is `command-a-plus-05-2026`. ### Was there ever a Cohere model called "Command 2.0"? No. Cohere has never shipped a model named Command 2.0, and has never used an N.0 version scheme for the Command family. The actual lineage is Command, Command R, Command R+, Command A, and Command A+. If you see a reference to Command 2.0, it is incorrect. ### Is Command A+ open weights? Yes. Command A+ is released under the Apache 2.0 license, and the weights are published on Hugging Face by Cohere Labs. The primary release is the W4A4 quantized checkpoint, `CohereLabs/command-a-plus-05-2026-w4a4`, with BF16 and FP8 variants also available. ### How large is Command A+? 218 billion total parameters with 25 billion active per token. It is Cohere's first Mixture-of-Experts model — every previous Command model was dense. ### What is the context window of Command A+? 128K tokens of input context and up to 64K tokens of generation. Note that this is smaller than Command A (`command-a-03-2025`), which has a 256K context window but only 8K max output. ### Does Command A+ replace Command A? Not entirely. Cohere describes Command A+ as "the last model in the Command A family" and the fastest and most performant of the group, but `command-a-03-2025` remains live and is still the right choice when you need a 256K context window. ### How much does Command A+ cost? Cohere publishes no per-token price. Instead, its docs state that "for both trial keys and production keys, Command A+ is free until rate limits are reached." Beyond those limits, production access runs through Cohere's Model Vault, whose hourly and monthly instance rates are on the pricing page. The Apache 2.0 weights can also be self-hosted at no license cost. ### What is the knowledge cutoff for Command A+? April 1, 2025, per Cohere's model documentation. ### What hardware does Command A+ need for self-hosting? Cohere states that Command A+ fits on a single NVIDIA B200 at W4A4 quantization, or on two H100s at W4A4. ### How many languages does Command A+ support? 48 languages, including all official European Union languages. This is an expansion from the 23 languages covered by earlier Command A models. ### Does Command A+ support reasoning and tool use? Yes. It accepts text and image input and produces text, reasoning traces, and tool calls. Reasoning can be enabled or disabled per request, and a thinking token budget can be set. It is served through Cohere's Chat endpoint. ## Related ### Related models - [Mistral Medium 3.5](https://howaiworks.ai/models/mistral-medium) - [Llama 4](https://howaiworks.ai/models/llama) - [DeepSeek V4](https://howaiworks.ai/models/deepseek) - [Qwen3.8-Max](https://howaiworks.ai/models/qwen) - [GPT-6 Astra](https://howaiworks.ai/models/gpt) - [DBRX (Discontinued)](https://howaiworks.ai/models/dbrx) --- Source: https://howaiworks.ai/models/command — HowAIWorks.ai