Forbes has taken steps to stop AI companies from using its articles to train their AI systems without permission. It has blocked AI web crawlers from its site, sent a legal cease-and-desist to Perplexity AI after it republished a Forbes exclusive using AI, and joined a group of 14 publishers in a federal copyright lawsuit against AI startup Cohere for allegedly using thousands of Forbes articles without authorization.

Forbes Chief Content Officer Randall Lane confirmed that the company uses its robots.txt file — a standard web file that instructs internet crawlers what they may and may not access — to block specific AI training crawlers. In June 2024, Perplexity AI published an AI-generated article that closely replicated a Forbes exclusive investigation, including what Forbes described as lifted fragments. Forbes sent a cease-and-desist letter and declined Perplexity's subsequent offer to join its Publishers Program, stating it undervalued Forbes journalism. In February 2025, Forbes joined 13 other publishers — including Condé Nast, The Atlantic, and The Guardian — in suing Cohere, a Canadian AI startup, for using over 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI models without authorization. A federal judge denied Cohere's motion to dismiss the case, allowing it to proceed.