Thought Leadership
The Heidelberg-based AI company has unveiled a German-English language model for government and industry that can run locally.
German AI company Aleph Alpha released its Kolibri language model on October 3, 2026. Designed for regulated industries such as government, industrial manufacturing, aerospace and defense, the open-weight model is available for download on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license. Running Kolibri requires the Aleph-Alpha-inference package, which includes a plugin for the vLLM inference engine.
“We started the year with the conviction that Europe needs its own sovereign AI. Built in Germany from scratch and on infrastructure in Europe specifically for our customers.”
78 Billion Parameters, 3.46 Billion Active
Kolibri is a bilingual Mixture-of-Experts model designed for German and English. The architecture divides the model into multiple subnetworks known as experts. Of its 78.1 billion total parameters, 3.46 billion are active per token. According to Aleph Alpha, this architecture allows Kolibri to run locally without sending internal data to external inference services. German accounts for 21.3 percent of the tokens used during pretraining.
Kolibri was trained on infrastructure in Germany and Finland. The company says the model meets the requirements of the EU AI Act, the Code of Practice for General-Purpose AI Models and the GDPR. It was also trained to respond with “I don’t know” when it cannot provide an answer, helping to reduce hallucinations.
Compared With Qwen, Mistral and Nvidia
Aleph Alpha compared Kolibri with three other open-weight models featuring up to four times as many active parameters: Alibaba’s Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B, Mistral Small 4 119B-A6B and Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12B. According to the company, Kolibri outperformed all three models on mathematical reasoning in German and English using AIME 2025 and 2026, complex reasoning with GPQA Diamond, and coding with LiveCodeBench v6. It also led the comparison in tests measuring search and navigation across large volumes of information. Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B performed better than Kolibri on long-context understanding and information retrieval from long contexts. Independent benchmark results are not yet available.
More European AI Models
In July, the German research consortium Soofi released the open-source Soofi S model. In Denmark, the University of Southern Denmark and company Ordbogen developed Mimir, a model with one billion parameters.
(Editorial Team)
