EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS have unveiled Apertus—Switzerland's first fully open large language model with unprecedented transparency. The 8B and 70B parameter models, trained on 1,000+ languages including Swiss German and Romansh, release all training data, weights, and architecture under permissive licenses. This landmark project establishes a blueprint for sovereign, ethical AI infrastructure accessible via Hugging Face and Swisscom's platform.