Cohere Inc. CEO Aidan Gomez met informally with a small team from German company Aleph Alpha, including Ilhan Scheer, now its co-CEO, over coffee last fall in Frankfurt, where the group realized they shared a similar philosophy about AI development, with sovereignty and safety important to Aleph Alpha. In April, Toronto-based Cohere and Heidelberg-based Aleph Alpha announced a deal to combine operations, and this week they said they had signed the agreement, which still requires regulatory approval. The goal is to create a bigger, more powerful AI company providing large language models and services to governments and businesses as an alternative to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. The deal is the most visible sign yet of how players in Canada and like-minded allies are striving for influence over AI, whose development is concentrated among a small group of powerful U.S. companies amid heightened geopolitical tensions under President Donald Trump, with China not far behind. Both the Canadian and German governments are in talks to provide funding to Cohere in its next round. At Montreal’s All In conference, federal AI Minister Evan Solomon said every country needs the capacity to make choices about the technologies shaping its future, as Canada forges deeper ties with Germany and other countries and puts money into AI safety initiatives.