Apertus: Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

Apertus (apertvs.ai) is an open-source foundation model designed to provide European organizations with a sovereign AI alternative to US and Chinese models. It emphasizes transparency, data privacy, and compliance with GDPR. The model is trained on a curated multilingual European corpus and includes instruction-tuning for various tasks. Apertus aims to reduce dependency on foreign AI infrastructure and promote local innovation. The project is backed by a consortium of European research institutions and startups, and the model weights are released under an open license.