Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri-1, a German reasoning model you can download and run yourself
The Heidelberg lab has published a 78-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model under the Apache 2.0 licence, tuned for German and English and designed to be run on your own hardware. Its own merger with Canada's Cohere has still not closed.
Aleph Alpha released Kolibri-1 on 6 October 2026, and it is an unusually literal take on sovereign AI: the weights are published under the Apache 2.0 licence, so anyone can download the model and run it on hardware they control.
The specification is a mixture-of-experts design with 78 billion total parameters but only about 3.46 billion active per token, which is what makes it cheap to serve relative to its size. It has an explicit reasoning mode with three effort levels, supports tool calling, and its implicit knowledge runs to 18 June 2026. The published context length is just over a million tokens, with Aleph Alpha recommending 262,144 for serving efficiency. Running it is not trivial — the FP8 weights occupy roughly 78 GB, so the floor is two A100s or a single H200 — but that is a procurement question rather than a permission question, which is the point.
The interesting engineering is in the tokenizer. Most multilingual models compromise across dozens of languages; Kolibri targets German and English only, so it represents German text in fewer tokens. In a test by the German technology publisher heise, the model needed 1,137 tokens to encode the Bundestag’s glossary where the Chinese model DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash needed 1,910. Fewer tokens means lower cost, shorter contexts and faster inference on exactly the German-language legal and administrative text the model is aimed at. heise’s verdict called it a solid model that argues well in German and is well suited to companies and public authorities, singling out the unusually detailed technical report as the kind of traceability a GDPR- and EU-AI-Act-compatible model needs.
The context is that Aleph Alpha’s own ownership is unsettled. The Heidelberg company signed a definitive merger agreement with Canada’s Cohere on 16 September 2026, under which Cohere shareholders would hold roughly 90 per cent of the combined group. That transaction is still awaiting regulatory clearance and has not closed, so Aleph Alpha remains German-controlled today. An Apache-licensed model is the one part of that story that cannot be undone by a change of parent: weights already downloaded stay downloadable, and the published model has been pulled nearly twenty thousand times since release.
For readers comparing European options, Kolibri sits in a different place from the assistants in this catalog. Mistral’s Vibe and Aleph Alpha’s own Adaptive Platform are services you sign in to. Kolibri-1 is a file you host, which makes it a candidate for organisations whose actual requirement is that no prompt leaves their own network.