Swiss AI model Apertus turns one: 4 million downloads, few business users yet

What happened

On 2 September 2026 swissinfo.ch took stock of Apertus, the open AI model built by EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and released in September 2025. It counted about 4 million downloads, more than 70 documented outside deployments and over 100 adapted versions. Version 1.5, released in July, added image understanding. A 2.0 version is planned for 2027.

Why it matters for your business

Apertus is “open”: anyone can download it, run it on their own servers and see what data it was trained on. About 40% of its training data is not in English, and Swiss national languages were a focus.

Real uses so far are mostly public sector and research. The Ticino cantonal migration office is moving its automated document translation to Apertus, and Zurich runs a citizen-query tool on it. On the business side the picture is mixed. Damiano Binaghi of the AI firm Artificialy told swissinfo his company uses it “because it’s a good model”, while the agency Liip said it had not yet used it in client projects.

For most SMEs, Apertus is not a ChatGPT replacement you sign up for. It is a building block. It becomes interesting if you want an AI tool that runs entirely on Swiss servers, for example to translate documents with client data you would never paste into a US service.

The Swiss angle

The whole story is Swiss, so the practical point is cost. The model is free to use under an open licence. Running it is not free: you need a hosting provider or an IT partner, and the costs depend on their setup. Ask any Swiss IT supplier who pitches “sovereign AI” which model they run and where it is hosted.

What to do

Nothing to buy yet. If you handle sensitive client documents in several national languages (Treuhand, legal, health), ask your IT partner one question: can they host Apertus for translation on Swiss infrastructure, and at what monthly cost?

Update, October 2026: on 17 September ETH Zurich announced that Proton’s Lumo assistant now offers Apertus 1.5 as a model option (ETH Zurich). That gives non-technical users a way to try it without any setup.

Sources

swissinfo.ch, “One year on, has Swiss AI model Apertus lived up to the hype?”, 2 September 2026: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-ai/one-year-on-has-swiss-ai-model-apertus-lived-up-to-the-hype/91984276
ETH Zurich news, September 2026: https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2026/09/apertus-partners-with-protons-lumo-ai-assistant.html