Aleph Alpha (Kolibri, PhariaAI)
German sovereign-AI lab with an open-weight model, merging into Cohere
Overview
Aleph Alpha builds German-English LLMs and the PhariaAI platform for on-prem, air-gapped or sovereign-cloud deployment. In October 2026 it released Kolibri, a 78B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with open weights under Apache 2.0. A definitive agreement to combine with Cohere was signed on 16 September 2026 and awaits regulatory approval.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 12 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- 78B total parameters, 3B active
- Context up to 1M tokens
- German and English
- On-premises, air-gapped or sovereign SaaS
- Document AI parsing and retrieval
- Agent orchestration and runtime
- Inference serving
What you can produce with Aleph Alpha (Kolibri, PhariaAI)
- Kolibri-1 weights to download and self-host under Apache 2.0
- A German-reasoning LLM with retrieval, tool calling and abstention when evidence is missing
- Platform deployment on-premises, air-gapped or as sovereign SaaS
- Parsing and retrieval from dense documents, tables and scans with source-quoted answers
- Agents composed from reusable skills with approval gates and action logs
- PhariaAssistant for summarising, extraction and translation
- Data ingestion and search with Pharia Data v2
Aleph Alpha sells control rather than benchmark leadership: models and a platform that German public bodies, defence and regulated industry can run on infrastructure they own. Kolibri, released in October 2026 with Apache 2.0 weights, shows the company is training models again, and its German-language focus is a real differentiator.
The caveat is the pending Cohere deal: once it closes the company will operate as Cohere, and neither side has said what happens to PhariaAI. Pricing is quote-only, and Luminous is deprecated, so anyone still on it should plan a migration.
What we found
Aleph Alpha is still trading under its own name, but not for much longer. On 16 September 2026 it signed a definitive business combination agreement with Cohere; the merged company will operate globally as Cohere, with planned dual headquarters in Berlin and Toronto and the Heidelberg office kept as a research centre. Closing awaits regulatory approval and is expected later this year, and until then Aleph Alpha says it operates independently. Neither company has published valuation or share terms: the roughly $20 billion figure and the 90/10 split in Cohere's favour come from press reports. Earlier versions of this page stated them as fact and dated the deal to April, when only a plan was announced.
The bigger surprise is technical. Aleph Alpha repositioned itself around the PhariaAI platform in 2024, which many read as a retreat from training models. On 3 October 2026 it released Kolibri, a German-English mixture-of-experts model with 78 billion total and about 3 billion active parameters and a context of up to a million tokens, and published the weights on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. Its own tables put Kolibri ahead of Qwen3.6 35B-A3B on German GPQA Diamond and behind it on MMLU-ProX; those are vendor-run numbers with no independent replication yet.
The platform keeps shipping. PhariaAI release notes show monthly versions through September 2026, for on-premise and hosted use, while the June 2026 release deprecated the Luminous inference worker, so Luminous should be treated as legacy. The website now sells the stack as an adaptive platform for on-premises, air-gapped or sovereign-cloud deployment.
No rating could be read on a major review site, and the company's case figures, such as an assistant serving 80,000 users at a public authority, are its own.
Fit is narrow: German public administration, defence and regulated industry that need models on infrastructure they control. Buyers elsewhere, including in Southeast Asia, are effectively asking about Cohere's roadmap once the deal closes.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Aleph Alpha (Kolibri, PhariaAI)'s official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Aleph Alpha (Kolibri, PhariaAI) unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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