# Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

> Source: <https://apertvs.ai/>
> Published: 2026-06-21 21:29:43+00:00

[Jun 15](/articles/2026-06-apertus-mini/)

**Apertus Mini**

A set of 16 small language models released to demonstrate distillation and quantization techniques.

Developed 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.

Training data, code, weights, methods, and alignment principles — all documented and reproducible. Apertus is to AI as Open is to Source.

Built to meet EU AI Act requirements: the model respects opt-outs, removes PII, prevents memorization. A global foundation to build on.

Competitive with top open models at an equivalent scale of 8B and 70B parameters. Multilingual from day one — trained on 1000+ languages.

[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.

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