Apertus AI Translation — Ticino's On-Premise, Sovereign Model for Multilingual Government Documents

The Centro Sistemi Informativi (CSI), the IT department of Ticino's Department of Finance and Economy, worked with AI vendor Artificialy and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) to fine-tune Apertus-8B — Switzerland's publicly funded, open-source large language model released in 2025 — into an in-house translation tool for cantonal administration.

To provide sovereign, on-premise AI translation for cantonal staff handling potentially sensitive government documents, as an alternative to sending confidential text through commercial cloud AI services.

The tool runs entirely on CSI's own on-premise GPU infrastructure, translating between Italian, German, French, Spanish, Romanian and Ukrainian for roughly 100 employees who need daily translation of government documents.

CSI's own reported benchmark shows the fine-tuned Apertus-8B scoring 94% on its internal translation-quality benchmark, up from a 90% baseline before fine-tuning.

No independent, citizen-facing outcome data (time saved, translation volume, error rates in production) had been published as of the most recent reporting, and the tool was entering its testing phase with a small user group, not yet a canton-wide rollout — a concrete, real deployment of a sovereign open-source model with one honest technical metric and clearly labelled pilot status.