The New Swiss AI Flagship

Apertus is the first large language model from Switzerland, developed by Swiss-AI with a focus on precision, multilingualism, and European values. Now exclusively available on our AI platform.

Two Model Variants for Every Need

Apertus 70B

The flagship model with 70 billion parameters offers:

• Highest precision for complex tasks
• Advanced reasoning capabilities
• Optimized for demanding business applications
• Multilingual competence (German, French, Italian, English)

Apertus 8B

The efficient model with 8 billion parameters:

• Fast response times
• Cost-efficient operation
• Ideal for real-time applications
• Perfect for standardized tasks

Swiss Quality Meets Innovation

• 100% GDPR compliant: Fully hosted in Switzerland
• Data sovereignty: Your data stays in Europe
• Transparency: Open-source based and traceable
• Multilingual: Native support for all Swiss national languages

Application Areas

• Document analysis: Processing and summarizing complex documents
• Code generation: Support for software development
• Creative content: Text creation at the highest quality
• Data analysis: Insights from structured and unstructured data
• Customer service: Intelligent chatbots and support systems

Technical Highlights

• Fine-tuned on European datasets
• Optimized for Swiss context and culture
• Advanced security features
• API-compatible with common standards
• Seamless integration into existing systems

Pricing Models

Transparent and fair pricing:

• Pay-per-use without hidden costs
• Volume discounts for enterprises
• Free trial period available
• Individual enterprise packages

Try Now

Experience the future of Swiss AI. Register today for free trial access and discover the possibilities of Apertus.

Background: The Development of Apertus

A Milestone in Swiss AI Research

Researchers at EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed Apertus, a fully open Large Language Model (LLM) – one of the largest of its kind. As a foundational technology, Apertus enables innovation and strengthens AI expertise across research, society and industry by allowing others to build upon it.

Apertus is currently available through strategic partner Swisscom, the AI platform Hugging Face, and the Public AI network.

The Initiative

In July, EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS announced their joint initiative to build a large language model (LLM). Now, this model is available and serves as a building block for developers and organisations for future applications such as chatbots, translation systems, or educational tools.

The model is named Apertus – Latin for “open” – highlighting its distinctive feature: the entire development process, including its architecture, model weights, and training data and recipes, is openly accessible and fully documented.

Fully Open-Source LLM

As a fully open language model, Apertus allows researchers, professionals and enthusiasts to build upon the model and adapt it to their specific needs, as well as to inspect any part of the training process. This distinguishes Apertus from models that make only selected components accessible.

“With this release, we aim to provide a blueprint for how a trustworthy, sovereign, and inclusive AI model can be developed,” says Martin Jaggi, Professor of Machine Learning at EPFL and member of the Steering Committee of the Swiss AI Initiative.

A Driver of Innovation

With its open approach, EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS are venturing into new territory. “Apertus is not a conventional case of technology transfer from research to product. Instead, we see it as a driver of innovation and a means of strengthening AI expertise across research, society and industry,” says Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS and Professor at ETH Zurich.

Multilingualism at its Core

Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages – 40% of the data is non-English – Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others.

“Apertus is built for the public good. It stands among the few fully open LLMs at this scale and is the first of its kind to embody multilingualism, transparency, and compliance as foundational design principles,” says Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the LLM project and Research Scientist at ETH Zurich.

Partnership with Swisscom

“Swisscom is proud to be among the first to deploy this pioneering large language model on our sovereign Swiss AI Platform. As a strategic partner of the Swiss AI Initiative, we are supporting the access of Apertus during the Swiss {ai} Weeks. This underscores our commitment to shaping a secure and responsible AI ecosystem that serves the public interest and strengthens Switzerland’s digital sovereignty,” comments Daniel Dobos, Research Director at Swisscom.

Accessibility and Availability

While setting up Apertus is straightforward for professionals and proficient users, additional components such as servers, cloud infrastructure or specific user interfaces are required for practical use. The upcoming Swiss {ai} Weeks will be the first opportunity for developers to experiment hands-on with Apertus, test its capabilities, and provide feedback for improvements to future versions.

Swisscom will provide a dedicated interface to hackathon participants, making it easier to interact with the model. As of today, Swisscom business customers will be able to access the Apertus model via Swisscom’s sovereign Swiss AI platform.

Furthermore, for people outside of Switzerland, the Public AI Inference Utility will make Apertus accessible as part of a global movement for public AI. “Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity,” says Joshua Tan, Lead Maintainer of the Public AI Inference Utility.

Transparency and Compliance

Apertus is designed with transparency at its core, thereby ensuring full reproducibility of the training process. Alongside the models, the research team has published a range of resources: comprehensive documentation and source code of the training process and datasets used, model weights including intermediate checkpoints – all released under the permissive open-source license, which also allows for commercial use.

Apertus was developed with due consideration to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws, and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act. Particular attention has been paid to data integrity and ethical standards: the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. It is filtered to respect machine-readable opt-out requests from websites, even retroactively, and to remove personal data, and other undesired content before training begins.

The Beginning of a Journey

“Apertus demonstrates that generative AI can be both powerful and open,” says Antoine Bosselut, Professor and Head of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at EPFL and Co-Lead of the Swiss AI Initiative. “The release of Apertus is not a final step, rather it’s the beginning of a journey, a long-term commitment to open, trustworthy, and sovereign AI foundations, for the public good worldwide. We are excited to see developers engage with the model at the Swiss {ai} Weeks hackathons. Their creativity and feedback will help us to improve future generations of the model.”

Future versions aim to expand the model family, improve efficiency, and explore domain-specific adaptations in fields like law, climate, health and education. They are also expected to integrate additional capabilities, while maintaining strong standards for transparency.