Germany’s Aleph Alpha Releases Kolibri, a Sovereign AI Model for Mission-Critical Applications

German AI company Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, a new open-weight AI model designed for mission-critical applications across public administration, industry and aerospace. The English-German model is built around sovereignty, deployment flexibility and predictable performance for organisations that need to keep control of their data and AI infrastructure.

Founded in 2019 by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach, Aleph Alpha develops specialised language models and AI solutions for enterprises and public institutions. Weinbach remains the company’s Co-Chief Research Officer and co-founder, while Jonas Andrulis is no longer part of the company’s current leadership. Aleph Alpha is now led by CEO Ilhan Scheer.

Kolibri is an English-German Mixture-of-Experts Transformer with 78.1 billion total parameters, while only around 3.46 billion parameters are active per token. It supports context windows of up to one million tokens and offers different reasoning-effort levels, allowing organisations to balance response quality, latency and operating costs.

The model has been specifically optimised for German and English, reasoning, mathematics, coding, long-context tasks and agentic applications. Aleph Alpha says Kolibri can match models with up to four times as many active parameters across several benchmarks. It has also been trained to abstain when supporting evidence is missing, helping reduce unsupported answers in sensitive applications.

Sovereignty is central to Kolibri’s design. Aleph Alpha says the model was developed in Germany and trained on infrastructure in Germany and Finland under European and German law. The company controlled the pipeline from data curation and training through post-training and evaluation. The model is available with its full weights under the Apache 2.0 licence, allowing organisations to deploy it on their own infrastructure rather than sending sensitive information to external inference providers.

Aleph Alpha has also designed Kolibri around European regulatory requirements, including the EU AI Act, the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice and GDPR. Its focus reflects the company’s broader strategy of providing sovereign AI systems for governments and regulated industries where data control, transparency and compliance are critical.

The launch comes as Aleph Alpha prepares for its planned combination with Canadian AI company Cohere. The proposed transaction is intended to create a transatlantic sovereign AI company, with Aleph Alpha’s Heidelberg location continuing as a research hub.

With Kolibri, Aleph Alpha is positioning its latest model as a practical foundation for organisations that need capable AI while retaining control over where models run, how they are governed and how sensitive information is handled.