Yes, in two common situations. The EU AI Act applies to Swiss companies that place an AI system or general-purpose AI model on the EU market, and to companies whose AI system's output is used inside the EU - even if the system runs entirely on servers in Switzerland. No EU office or subsidiary is required.

About three out of four Swiss SMEs now use or are testing AI. In the 2026 AXA labour-market study, 35% of SMEs with five or more employees had built AI into their processes and 39% were testing it, leaving 26% not using it at all. Two years earlier, 45% were not using it.

Apertus is Switzerland's first large-scale, fully open language model, released on 2 September 2025 by EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). Everything about it - architecture, model weights, training data and methods - is publicly documented and free to use, including commercially.

Yes - but it is a choice you have to make deliberately, and it can cost more. The major cloud providers now offer AI processing inside Swiss data centres, and keeping Microsoft 365 Copilot data in Switzerland has been a paid, configured option since late 2025. The default settings of most AI tools still send data abroad.

Switzerland's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has spent much of 2026 warning about AI-powered fraud: fake shops and websites written by AI, AI-generated images and videos used in scams, romance fraud built with synthetic personas, and CEO-fraud payment requests. The common defence is verification on a second, known channel.

In October 2026 the EU formally adopted the "AI Omnibus", amending the AI Act. The headline change for Swiss companies: the strictest rules for high-risk AI systems now apply from 2 December 2027 (stand-alone systems) and 2 August 2028 (systems embedded in regulated products) - not from August 2026 as originally planned.