On June 11, 2026, Toronto-based Cohere released North Mini Code, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight model that the company says outperforms rivals more than three times its size on industry coding benchmarks. It is the first model Cohere has ever shipped aimed squarely at individual developers, and it lands under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence, making it free to download, modify and deploy commercially. North Mini Code is a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with just 3 billion parameters active per token. The release is a strategic departure for a company that built its US$7-billion valuation selling closed enterprise AI to banks, governments and Fortune 500 boards. With Cohere North Mini Code, the lab is planting a flag in the fast-moving open-weight model race that, until now, has been dominated by a wave of Chinese laboratories. For Canada, the launch is also a test of whether “sovereign AI” can be more than a slogan.