Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

Apertus is an open-source foundation AI model developed by Swiss institutions (EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS) that provides fully transparent training data, code, and weights across multiple languages. The model comes in 8B and 70B parameter versions competitive with other open models, includes built-in privacy protections compliant with EU AI Act requirements, and the latest version (1.5) adds multimodal capabilities and extended context length. The initiative emphasizes reproducibility and responsible AI development as part of Switzerland's sovereign AI strategy.