Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri, a sovereign open-weight model
Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, an English-German Mixture-of-Experts model designed for sovereign, mission-critical work. The model features 78 billion total parameters with 3 billion active parameters and supports context lengths of up to 1 million tokens. Weights are available under the Apache 2.0 license. Aleph Alpha states the model is specialized for regulated sectors like public administration and aerospace, allowing customers to run it on-premise without sending data to third-party inference services.
aleph-alpha.com
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HN discussion
OpenAI safety report lead resigns over company culture
David Robinson, who led the safety reports accompanying OpenAI product releases, resigned and argued that the company’s culture does not match the care required for increasingly capable AI systems. He said frontier labs should borrow layered safety practices from nuclear power and aviation, and develop methods to rein in autonomous systems. OpenAI responded that it is strengthening safety and security practices, pausing training or holding back models when necessary. Robinson’s criticism focused on the pace of launches and what he described as insufficient attention to risks rather than a single policy dispute.
theguardian.com
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HN discussion
Federal judge rules Flock license plate search unconstitutional
A federal judge ruled that a Tulsa, Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights by using Flock Safety to search her license plate without a warrant. Judge Sara Hill noted the deputy had no apparent reason for the search other than the vehicle having a California plate. Consequently, all evidence obtained after the Flock search must be suppressed. Hill described the system as indiscriminate mass surveillance, noting it collects information about all vehicles passing network-connected cameras at all times and serves that data to law enforcement on demand.
techcrunch.com
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HN discussion
Cloudflare launches closed beta for self-serve OHTTP Gateway
Cloudflare has launched the closed beta of its self-serve OHTTP Gateway. The company is simultaneously renaming its existing Privacy Gateway to Cloudflare OHTTP Relay to distinguish the two products. Oblivious HTTP is an IETF standard that allows app backends to receive requests without seeing user IP addresses. In this architecture, a relay blindly forwards encrypted requests, while a gateway handles the cryptographic decapsulation. This separation ensures no single party sees both client identifiers and request contents. Customers can now enable the new Gateway as a paid add-on to their zone. This option is best for app servers already hosted on Cloudflare infrastructure.
blog.cloudflare.com
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HN discussion
Kagi ends development of Orion for Linux and Windows
Kagi is ending development of Orion for Linux and Windows and open-sourcing both platforms. The company is stepping back to focus its small team on making Orion for macOS and iOS faster and more stable. The current Linux Beta will stop receiving updates from Kagi after October 2, 2026. The planned late 2026 Windows release will not come from Kagi; instead, the code will be available for the community to build on.
blog.kagi.com
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HN discussion
The case for default hard budget caps on pay-by-usage services
The author argues that pay-by-usage services and APIs should implement default hard budget caps. This feature would automatically cut off services and return errors once a monthly spending limit is reached, rather than merely sending warning emails. The writer contends that coding agents reduce the friction of spinning up code that consumes paid resources, making soft caps insufficient. They assert that most individuals and businesses would prefer encountering errors to receiving unexpectedly large bills, concluding that hard limits must be the standard default.
simonwillison.net
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HN discussion