Current AI, a global partnership building a public option for AI, has launched Alpha Chat, an experimental open-source chatbot powered by Apertus, Switzerland’s sovereign large language model. The prototype demonstrates how Apertus can be integrated into applications developed by external organizations.
Founded at the AI Action Summit in Paris in 2025, Current AI is mobilizing $2.5 billion over five years to build a public alternative to proprietary AI. As a first step, it has launched a 12-month sprint to build a vertically integrated and easy-to-use AI product assembled by a global community, entirely from open-source components.
The first milestone in this project, dubbed AI Potluck, was to develop Alpha Chat, built in 7 weeks with contributions from the global open-source AI community.
Alpha Chat runs on Apertus, Switzerland’s fully open, transparent and multilingual language model developed by EPFL, ETHZ and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) as part of the Swiss AI Initiative. Apertus was selected by Current AI after an independent evaluation of the open-weight landscape for provenance integrity, openness, governance, and multilingual capability.
“When we released Apertus, our goal was simple: a fully open foundation model, including data, training pipeline, and methodology, that anyone can build on without asking permission. AI Potluck is now doing exactly that. We are glad to see Apertus serve as a building block for a public-interest AI stack that no single company or country owns, and we look forward to following where the community takes it,” said Professor Martin Jaggi, from EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences and one of the team leading the Apertus project.
Alpha Chat embeds a number of design features intended to give users greater visibility and control over their interactions. It does not anthropomorphize, which means it doesn’t present itself as a person, or encourage users to remain engaged for as long as possible. The tool allows you to see how much time and energy a user has spent and offers one click to delete all data. To enable users to look under the hood of the AI stack, Alpha Chat features a transparent view which exposes all the tools as they are used during a chat session.
“Every culture has a version of the potluck, a shared meal where everyone brings their best and what emerges is something no single cook could make alone” said Ayah Bdeir, Current AI CEO. “We built a working product in 7 weeks because the open-source AI ecosystem is full of incredible building blocks. This is proof that we can do ambitious things if we collaborate towards a shared goal.”
Alpha Chat is a separate application developed and operated by Current AI and its project partners. The use of Apertus as its foundation model does not mean that EPFL operates the chatbot or manages its deployment or user data.
Author: Tanya Petersen