‘Switzerland must not give in to the Big Tech narrative’

Around 75% of companies in Switzerland mainly use AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Copilot for tasks like text generation, coding and data analysis. Keystone

Switzerland can be more independent from tech giants like Microsoft when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), says a leading digital sovereignty expert.

Switzerland is heavily dependent on foreign digital and AI technologies. Some 75% of companiesExternal link in the Alpine country mainly use AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Copilot (part of Microsoft) for tasks like text generation, coding and data analysis. This figure is in line with global trends.External link

The Swiss government and its administration are also heavily dependent on the digital applications of large US technology companies, especially Microsoft. A change of supplier is considered ‘too risky and costly’, the administration wrote in a statementExternal link in 2023 announcing the switch to Microsoft 365.

Today, however, there is a growing awareness that relying on technologies from so-called Big Tech – major global players such as Microsoft, Amazon or OpenAI – carries risks. The head of the Swiss armed forces, Thomas Süssli, recently warned of the dangers to national security in an internal letter to the government made public by the online newspaper Republik.External link

“As long as our documents are in Microsoft’s cloud, the US government can access them,” says Matthias Stürmer, director of the Institute for Public Sector Transformation at Bern University of Applied Sciences and an expert on digital sovereignty. Geopolitical risks have increased under the new US presidential administration because “the US government no longer follows the rules”, says Stürmer.

At the end of last year, the Swiss federal administration announced plans to spend CHF140 millionExternal link ($174 million) to renew Microsoft licences for three years. Stürmer believes that if Switzerland invested even 10% of what it spends on IT solutions from large US-based tech companies, it could easily gain more digital sovereignty.

“It is not impossible to get out of the ‘gilded prison’ of expensive digital services in which Big Tech would like to lock us up,” he says.

When renewing its latest contract with Microsoft, the federal administration said it is exploring open-source alternatives to reduce its “numerous dependencies” on the US tech giant’s proprietary software.

Ideal conditions for digital sovereignty

Switzerland is well positioned to build its own digital infrastructure, says Stürmer, thanks to its universities, a strong community of computer engineers, and a growing ecosystem of open-source solutions.

The Swiss government has already started to invest in national IT infrastructure and technologies. In the field of AI, the country has spent more than CHF100 million francs on the Alps supercomputer and the Swiss AI Initiative, which in September launched Apertus, Switzerland’s first fully open and public large-language model (LLM). To strengthen digital transparency, a Swiss lawExternal link requires that all government-owned software are made publicly available – a step forward that EU analysts describe as “a legal milestone”External link at the European level.

Apertus itself, according to Stürmer, is an example of how Switzerland can develop sovereign and European-compliant AI tools that are a viable alternative to those from Big Tech. “They want us to believe that only they are able to create and manage AI, but this is false,” he says. “Switzerland must not give in to this narrative.”

But not everyone agrees. Marcel Salathé, co-director of the Centre for AI at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), believes that models such as Apertus represent a step forward, but not a breakthrough. Key resources for building AI systems – such as computing power, chips, and data – are still dominated by a few tech powers. “There is no such thing as sovereignty in AI, because this technology is in the hands of China and the United States,” he points out.

>> Read more about why some critical voices believe Switzerland is still far from AI sovereignty:

Handling sensitive data

Stürmer feels that initiatives such as Apertus, though not comparable in scope to the likes of GPT-5, are crucial to the country’s digital transition in all sectors, including medicine. “We cannot use ChatGPT for sensitive medical data. Apertus is necessary because it is transparent and independent of political and commercial interests,” he says.

In addition to Apertus, Stürmer points to hundreds of open-source software and digital platforms, used and developed in Switzerland or other European countries, that can replace US-based tools and strengthen the country’s technological autonomy. One example is openDeskExternal link, an alternative to Microsoft Office developed in Germany by the Centre for Digital Sovereignty. To make these solutions more visible, Stürmer helped found the Network for a Sovereign Digital SwitzerlandExternal link, which connects Swiss public and private-sector organisations.

World gets closer to sovereign AI

Today, there are already more than two million open-source AI models published on aggregative platforms such as Hugging Face, where they can be shared and downloaded. These include the Swiss-based Apertus, which is “the only European LLM among the top ten worldwide on Hugging Face,” says Joshua Tan. He is a US-based software engineer and founder of the digital autonomy (self-governance) research community Metagov.

“Apertus shows that it is possible to build a high-level AI model without stealing data from the internet,” says Tan.

Tan also believes that the Big Tech narrative – that no one can compete with their AI systems and that those who try will be left behind – overshadows progress towards digital sovereignty. Besides Switzerland, several other countries have already moved to develop their own AI models through collaboration with national research labs or publicly-funded organisations.

These include Singapore, Spain and Sweden, and Tan believes more will follow. He advocates for an alliance of national governments to advance the development of sovereign AI solutions more effectively. “We are closer than many think: as we implement these models, people will begin to realise that this is not just a utopia, but something that can really change their lives in the present.”

Edited by Veronica De Vore/sb