Switzerland hosts the banks, the crypto foundations and the pharma giants, and it has decided, on purpose, not to write a law for AI. Here is what that bet looks like from the inside.
Start with the literal answer. Switzerland has no AI cybercrime law because it has no AI law at all. On 12 February 2025 the Federal Council decided there would be no Swiss equivalent of the EU AI Act. Instead, it will ratify the Council of Europe's AI Convention through small, sector-specific changes to existing laws, and a draft is due for consultation at the end of 2026. The stated goal is to avoid a "Swiss finish", meaning any burden Swiss firms would carry that EU competitors do not.
Which means that today, in October 2026, an AI-driven attack on a Swiss bank is handled by laws written when the attacker was assumed to be a person.
Is that a gap, or is it the point?
The case that the law is already enough
Swiss criminal law does not care how you broke in. Unauthorised access, data theft, data damage and computer fraud are all offences under the Criminal Code, and none of those articles mention the tool. A ransomware gang using a model to write its exploit commits exactly the same crime as one using a human. Prosecutors in Zurich do not need the words "artificial intelligence" in a statute to charge someone.
That is the Federal Council's argument, and it is not stupid. Technology-neutral law ages better than technology-specific law, and nobody in Bern wants a 2026 statute about "AI agents" that reads like a joke in 2030.
Switzerland did add one piece of hard law. Since April 2025, operators of critical infrastructure must report cyberattacks to the Federal Office for Cybersecurity within 24 hours, with fines up to CHF 100,000 for concealment since October. In the first ten months, 264 attacks were reported. Hospitals, banks, energy suppliers, telecoms. Nobody has been fined yet.
So if the crimes are covered and the reporting exists, what is missing?
What the reporting rule actually tells you
Look at the ratio. The Federal Office received about 65,000 cyber reports in 2025 from the public and companies. Only 264 came through the mandatory channel, because the duty covers critical infrastructure only. Every SME, every family office, every fiduciary, every small private bank below the threshold reports nothing to anyone unless it chooses to.
Now recall what the acceleration does. Exploits that used to cost an expert's week now cost a few thousand francs of compute. The targets that become profitable are precisely the small ones, the ones outside the reporting duty. Switzerland built its one hard rule around the victims attackers used to pick, and the rule is silent on the victims they are about to pick.
How many Swiss SMEs do you think reported a 2025 incident to anybody?
The banks: expectations, not rules
The financial regulator FINMA published its AI guidance in December 2024. It is non-binding. It expects boards to keep an inventory of every AI system, to own AI decisions rather than delegate them to vendors, and to treat AI as both a cyber vulnerability and a cyber target. FINMA's own observation at the time: many Swiss institutions are "in the early stages of AI governance".
Read those two facts together. The regulator says banks are early-stage on governing their own AI. The same banks are deploying agents that read email, move money and talk to customers. And the only thing standing between "expectation" and "rule" is a supervisory conversation.
Meanwhile, across the border, the EU AI Act has been in force since August 2024 and treats credit scoring and other financial uses as high-risk, with obligations and fines attached. Swiss banks serving EU clients are already building to that standard. So the "no Swiss finish" argument cuts both ways: Swiss firms avoid Swiss rules by following Brussels rules anyway.
If a Zurich bank already complies with the EU AI Act for its EU clients, who exactly is the Swiss light-touch approach protecting?
The real bet
Strip the politics away and Switzerland is betting on three things. That technology-neutral criminal law stays sufficient when the cost of attacking collapses. That voluntary guidance moves boards as fast as a binding rule would. And that a draft law arriving at the end of 2026, in force perhaps 2028, lands before the first serious AI-driven incident at a Swiss institution.
The first bet is reasonable. The second is optimistic. The third is a coin flip, and the coin is already in the air.
