September in review: a Swiss model, and a quieter month than August

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5 on 29 September 2025, described as its strongest model for coding and agent work. It closes a month that, unusually, had a Swiss headline at the top of it.

The month in four lines

Apertus, on 2 September: the first fully open multilingual model built by Swiss public institutions, weights and training data documentation published. Qwen3-Max on the 8th, large and closed. GPT-5-Codex on the 15th, the first clear sign of models specialising by domain. The Nvidia and OpenAI infrastructure announcement on the 22nd, ten gigawatts.

What actually changed for a Swiss SME

One thing, and it is not a model. « There is no European or Swiss option » stopped being an accurate sentence this month. That does not mean you should use one — the 4 September post was deliberately unromantic about what self-hosting involves — but the conversation with a supplier is different now that the alternative exists.

What did not change

Everything else in this month’s posts was about your own house rather than the industry: who decides, what is in the budget, which accounts are still open, what the contract says, and why a failed attempt usually failed for one of four boring reasons.

That ratio — four posts about the industry, six about your own arrangements — is roughly the right one, and it is the opposite of the ratio in most coverage.

Into October

If you do one thing this quarter, make it the sentence from 8 September: name the person who decides. Everything else in this blog is easier once somebody is in a position to act on it.

And a note for the file: this blog turns one year old in a fortnight.