{"slug": "apertus-open-foundation-model-for-sovereign-ai", "title": "Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI", "summary": "The Swiss AI Initiative, a collaboration between EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS, released Apertus Mini, a set of 16 small language models demonstrating distillation and quantization techniques. The open-source models, built to meet EU AI Act requirements, are competitive with top open models at 8B and 70B scales and support over 1,000 languages.", "body_md": "[Jun 15](/articles/2026-06-apertus-mini/)\n\n**Apertus Mini**\n\nA set of 16 small language models released to demonstrate distillation and quantization techniques.\n\nDeveloped by the [Swiss AI Initiative](https://www.swiss-ai.org/) as a collaborative effort between EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS. Open weights, open data, open science.\n\nTraining data, code, weights, methods, and alignment principles — all documented and reproducible. Apertus is to AI as Open is to Source.\n\nBuilt to meet EU AI Act requirements: the model respects opt-outs, removes PII, prevents memorization. A global foundation to build on.\n\nCompetitive with top open models at an equivalent scale of 8B and 70B parameters. Multilingual from day one — trained on 1000+ languages.\n\n[Swisscom](https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/enterprise/offer/platforms-applications/data-driven-business/swiss-ai-platform.html) is a Strategic Partner of the Swiss AI Initiative.\n\nOur newsletter will keep you on top of Apertus releases, our team's research, and community news.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/apertus-open-foundation-model-for-sovereign-ai", "canonical_source": "https://apertvs.ai/", "published_at": "2026-06-21 21:29:43+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-21 21:54:56.088756+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "ai-research", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Swiss AI Initiative", "EPFL", "ETH Zurich", "CSCS", "Swisscom", "Apertus Mini"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/apertus-open-foundation-model-for-sovereign-ai", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/apertus-open-foundation-model-for-sovereign-ai.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/apertus-open-foundation-model-for-sovereign-ai.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/apertus-open-foundation-model-for-sovereign-ai.jsonld"}}