Swiss AI was trained in Lugano and is free
Swiss AI Apertus was born at the Lugano supercomputer. Available for free via browser, it excels at translations and is already operational within the Ticino administration.
Every time I speak about artificial intelligence to an audience in Ticino, the same objection arises. They are all American or Chinese, our data ends up who-knows-where, and we are just standing by watching. It is a legitimate objection. It is also outdated, and few people know it.
The model is called Apertus, which means "open" in Latin. It was presented in September 2025 by EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. That centre, the CSCS, is located in Lugano. The Alps supercomputer that trained the model is right there, just minutes from your home.
The numbers help to understand the scale. The training used fifteen trillion units of text in over a thousand languages, and among these are Swiss German and Romansh—two languages that no American model had ever taken seriously. The model exists in two versions, a smaller one and a larger one. Both are completely open: weights, code, training data—everything is documented and public. No other institution in the world had ever released a model of this size with this level of transparency.
Then there is the part that closely concerns our canton. In March 2026, the Information Systems Centre of the Canton of Ticino launched an automated translation system based on Apertus, developed by the Ticino-based company Artificialy and hosted on cantonal servers. It is the first operational use of the Swiss model by a public entity. The reason is practical: every day the administration translates documents into German, French, Romanian, and Ukrainian, and many contain sensitive citizen data that must not leave the cantonal perimeter. With a model running in-house, they don't.
Let's get to the question that interests you: how to try it. The address is chat.publicai.co, managed by a non-profit organization that makes public models accessible. You open it in your browser, ask a question in Italian, and get an answer. Conversations are not used to train the model and can be deleted or exported. In July 2026, version 1.5 arrived, which also understands images and can handle much longer texts.
Three practical tips before you try it.
The first concerns expectations. Apertus does not beat American models at everything. It still lags behind in complex calculations and programming, and that must be said. Where it excels is translation between different languages, including less common ones, and understanding multilingual contexts. For a canton like ours, living amidst three linguistic cultures, it is exactly the right fit.
The second concerns businesses. Those who own an SME and are afraid of putting confidential documents into an American service now have a concrete alternative: Swisscom offers Apertus to business clients on its own sovereign platform, with the data remaining in Switzerland. It is not a solution you activate by yourself in half an hour, but it is the type of question to ask your IT specialist before signing yet another foreign subscription.
The third is the most important and is not technical. The fact that the first public user of Apertus is the Canton of Ticino, and not Zurich or Bern, is not just a detail for a press release. It means that there is expertise here, a world-class computing centre, and companies capable of building real solutions on top of it. I say this as someone who has been visiting companies in the canton for thirty years: the distance between Ticino and the rest of Switzerland regarding digital technology is much smaller than we tell ourselves.
The work doesn't stop here. The same initiative is developing specialized models for specific sectors, including one dedicated to medicine, which has been in testing at the Lausanne University Hospital since last spring. The direction is clear: public, verifiable models, built for concrete problems instead of for show.
Try it one evening, at your leisure. Have it translate a letter into German, ask it to explain a document. You won't be left open-mouthed as you are with American models. But you will know that behind it is a machine humming in a warehouse in Lugano, paid for in part with your money, whose data ends up in no one else's hands.
More info: https://www.apertus-ai.org