Apertus (LLM)
| Apertus | |
|---|---|
| Developers | |
| Initial release | September 2, 2025 |
| License | Apache 2.0 |
| Website | www |
Apertus is a Swiss public large language model, developed by the Swiss National AI Initiative (a collaboration between ETH Zurich, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).[1] It was released on September 2, 2025.[2]
Designed initially for business and research use cases around the world,[3] Apertus was trained on over 1800 languages, and comes in 8 billion or 70 billion parameter versions and is available on Hugging Face for download.[4][5] The model was developed aiming to adhere to European copyright law, and is one of the first examples of a sovereign, public AI in the vein of AI nationalism.[5][6][7] It is also the first large model to comply with the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act.[8][6] At its launch, the model creators emphasized safety and accessibility as priorities over building a frontier model.[9] The first iteration was significantly behind the capabilities of frontier models[3] and needs adaptation for many use cases with chatbots being a secondary but not a primary use case.[4]
As of late 2025, it was considered the largest and most capable fully open model.[3] The capability of future models will depend in part on how much more funding can be secured.[4]
See also
References
- ^ Moon, Mariella (2025-09-02). "Switzerland launches its own open-source AI model". Engadget. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ^ "Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model". ETH Zurich. September 3, 2025. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
- ^ a b c Ibrahim, Sara (2025-10-06). "Fact and fiction about the Swiss AI model Apertus". SWI swissinfo.ch. Retrieved 2026-01-28.
- ^ a b c "Apertus critics "misunderstand" Swiss AI model". SWI swissinfo.ch. 2025-10-21. Archived from the original on 2025-11-02. Retrieved 2026-01-28.
- ^ a b Welle, Elissa (September 3, 2025). "Switzerland releases an open-weight AI model". The Verge. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
- ^ a b Olff, Sabine (November 28, 2025). "Apertus: The Swiss open-source AI language model". dw.com. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
- ^ Khalili, Joel. "The Race to Build the DeepSeek of Europe Is On". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2026-01-28.
- ^ Kirchner, Malte (September 2, 2025). "Apertus: Switzerland presents first open and multilingual AI model". Heise Online. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
- ^ Allen, Matthew (2025-09-02). "Switzerland launches transparent ChatGPT alternative". SWI swissinfo.ch. Retrieved 2026-01-21.