# News: Aleph Alpha ships Kolibri: Apache 2.0 open-weight MoE with 1M-token context

> Aleph Alpha released Kolibri on 2026-10-03: an English-German Mixture-of-Experts model with 78.1B total parameters (3.46B active per token), full weights on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, 262K native context extending to 1M via a serve-time flag, and a published 189-page technical report.

Human page: https://testedactually.com/news/aleph-alpha-kolibri-open-weight/
Mirror: https://testedactually.com/news/aleph-alpha-kolibri-open-weight.md
Published: 2026-10-03

## What changed

Aleph Alpha released Kolibri on 2026-10-03: an English-German Mixture-of-Experts model with 78.1B total parameters (3.46B active per token), full weights on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, 262K native context extending to 1M via a serve-time flag, and a published 189-page technical report.

## What it means for buyers

EU-data-residency buyers get a permissively licensed, self-hostable model with a long-context story for on-prem agent stacks where US or Chinese models are non-starters. Practical notes for self-hosters: about 78 GB of weights in FP8 and served through Aleph Alpha's vLLM plugin rather than stock vLLM, so it is not yet an Ollama pull-and-run. The vendor-stated German token-efficiency edge is unverified by third parties so far. Reasoning is switchable, not baked in: Kolibri runs at four effort levels (none, low, medium, high), and Aleph Alpha positions the effort control as a way to trade serving cost and latency against answer quality per workload. Reasoning output is turned on at serve time in the vendor's vLLM plugin with --reasoning-parser kolibri1 alongside --tool-call-parser kolibri1, so a bare vLLM serve without those flags returns no separate reasoning traces.

## Sources

- [1] Kolibri has landed (Aleph Alpha, vendor primary) - https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-sovereign-open-weight-model/ (checked 2026-10-03, re-checked 2026-10-25)

TestedActually tracks pricing and programme changes as dated, sourced events: https://testedactually.com/news/.