“German Digital Affairs Minister Karsten Wildberger (CDU) pulled out all the stops on Friday to announce the merger between the Heidelberg-based AI start-up Aleph Alpha and the Canadian AI provider Cohere. His Canadian counterpart had flown in specifically for the occasion, and the co-founders of both companies sat alongside Wildberger at the press conference. Wildberger hailed the event as a "pivotal moment for our country's technological future."
Politically, the collaboration with Canada sends an important signal. However, it remains unclear whether the merger—personally championed by Wildberger—will live up to the advance praise.
Even combined, Cohere and Aleph Alpha remain tiny compared to industry heavyweights like OpenAI or Anthropic.
If Aleph Alpha were truly an attractive partner "on equal footing," Cohere could have acquired the much smaller German start-up on its own initiative long ago.
For Cohere, Aleph Alpha—with its sales network—serves as a door-opener to regulated European clients. One gets the impression that it was primarily the implicit promise of government contracts in Germany that made Aleph Alpha attractive to Cohere in the first place.
There is no fundamental objection to the state acting as an anchor customer for strategically important, high-potential technology. Yet, the federal government could have purchased Cohere’s AI offerings without the merger. With this industrial policy initiative, Wildberger runs the risk that the government is prematurely engineering its own winner in the race for the "trustworthy AI" market, rather than trusting the market itself.
The Digital Affairs Minister is right: Germany needs substantial AI capabilities to avoid making the digitalization of its public administration and the productivity growth of its economy entirely dependent on US providers.
Achieving this requires better framework conditions for European alternatives: a stronger EU single market, better access to growth capital, and more flexible regulation.
The merger between Cohere and Aleph Alpha addresses none of these structural problems.” [1]
1. Künstliche Industriepolitik. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 25 Apr 2026: 19. Von Maximilian Sachse
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