Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

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.

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. Our newsletter will keep you on top of Apertus releases, our team's research, and community news.