The DecoderOriginal · English

Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri, an open-weight model that makes the case for European AI sovereignty

Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, a German-English mixture-of-experts model with 78 billion parameters, about three billion of which are active per token. Over 21 percent of the training data is German. The model was…

Matthias Bastian
Image source · The Decoder

Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri, an open-weight model that makes the case for European AI sovereignty

Matthias Bastian 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.

Kolibri scores 71% on German benchmarks while decoding faster than comparable models like GPT OSS A5B, Qwen 3.6 A3B, and Gemma 4 A4B. | Image: Aleph Alpha

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.

Ad

AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans

Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.

Source: Model Card | Blog
Original source

The Decoder

Content notes

Original publication and rights belong to the source.