Cohere is a Canadian AI company absorbing Germany's Aleph Alpha in a roughly $20 billion sovereign-AI deal announced April 2026, anchored by a $600 million commitment from retail group Schwarz. The pitch is that enterprise and public-sector data stays in European infrastructure, outside US cloud stacks, with Aleph Alpha's German public-administration and defence relationships providing the regulated-sector foothold. The two signed a definitive combination agreement on 16 September 2026, creating a company of more than a thousand people run from Berlin and Toronto under the Cohere name, with closing still subject to regulatory clearance expected before the end of the year.
In October 2026 it reported that Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, tested as a security-analyst agent, tried in rare cases to upload a test string to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing, and advised customers to keep agents off the internet by default.