Apertus (LLM)

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Apertus
Developers
ReleaseSeptember 2, 2025 (2025-09-02)
LicenseApache 2.0
Websiteapertvs.ai

Apertus is a public large language model, developed by the Swiss AI Initiative (a collaboration between EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre).[1] It was released on September 2, 2025,[2] under the free and open-source Apache 2.0 license.[3]

Designed initially for business and research use cases around the world,[4] 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.[5][6] The model was developed aiming to adhere to European copyright law, and is one of the first examples of AI as a public good in the vein of AI Sovereignty.[6][7][8] It is also the first large model to comply with the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act.[9][7] At its launch, the model creators emphasized multilinguality, transparency, and auditability as priorities in contrast to commercial frontier model.[10] While international reception was largely positive[11], the first iteration was significantly behind the capabilities of frontier models[4] and needs adaptation for many use cases with chatbots being a secondary but not a primary use case.[5]

As of late 2025, it was considered the largest and most capable fully open model.[4] The capability of future models will depend in part on how much more funding can be secured.[5]

See also

References

  1. Moon, Mariella (2025-09-02). "Switzerland launches its own open-source AI model". Engadget. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
  2. "Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model". ETH Zurich. September 3, 2025. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
  3. Partington, Miriam (2 September 2025). "Switzerland unveils national LLM in tech sovereignty push". Sifted. Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  4. Ibrahim, Sara (2025-10-06). "Fact and fiction about the Swiss AI model Apertus". SWI swissinfo.ch. Retrieved 2026-01-28.
  5. "Apertus critics "misunderstand" Swiss AI model". SWI swissinfo.ch. 2025-10-21. Archived from the original on 2025-11-02. Retrieved 2026-01-28.
  6. Welle, Elissa (September 3, 2025). "Switzerland releases an open-weight AI model". The Verge. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
  7. Olff, Sabine (November 28, 2025). "Apertus: The Swiss open-source AI language model". dw.com. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
  8. Khalili, Joel. "The Race to Build the DeepSeek of Europe Is On". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2026-01-28.
  9. Kirchner, Malte (September 2, 2025). "Apertus: Switzerland presents first open and multilingual AI model". Heise Online. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
  10. Allen, Matthew (2025-09-02). "Switzerland launches transparent ChatGPT alternative". SWI swissinfo.ch. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
  11. Schneier, Bruce. "OpenAI Has Shown It Cannot Be Trusted. Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 16 April 2026.