Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri, an open-weight model that makes the case for European AI sovereignty
Matthias Bastian
View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Oct 5, 2026
Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, a German-English language model with 78 billion parameters, about three billion of which are active per token through a mixture-of-experts architecture. Aleph Alpha claims Kolibri sits on the Pareto front of quality and operating cost in both languages, outperforming compared models with similar architectures, some significantly older (March, April 2026), on either metric. German accounts for 21.3 percent of the training data, backed by a dedicated German data pipeline the company built for the project. Chinese models were also used to generate synthetic training data.

Aleph Alpha says Kolibri targets public administration, aviation, and industry. The model was developed under European law with the EU AI Act in mind, supports context windows of up to one million tokens, and was trained on 768 B200 GPUs in Germany and Finland, according to the tech report. The weights are available under an Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face.
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Source: Model Card | Blog