AI models tested for Arabic

Frontier Arabic model announced by HUMAIN at LEAP Riyadh on 3 Sept 2026: a 428B-parameter mixture-of-experts model on the MiniMax-M3 lineage, further pretrained on more than one trillion tokens of Arabic-native content. Commissioned by HUMAIN and delivered by MiniMax. As of 10 Sept 2026 it is research preview only — reachable through HUMAIN Node's playground and an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with no weights published. HUMAIN says it expects to release weights under the MiniMax Community License after safety training, targeted for October 2026.

Arabic-localised LLM family with cultural alignment, co-developed by KAUST and King Abdulaziz University with CUHK-Shenzhen and SRIBD. Version 2 ships base and chat variants at 8B, 32B and 70B. The repos have not been updated since Nov 2024 and there is no v3.

Compact bidirectional Arabic–English translation model fine-tuned from Kuwain-1.5B; reported state of the art on the Tarjama-25 benchmark, which Misraj also published. Weights are not on Hugging Face — Misraj released the Tarjama-25 dataset and the evaluation code but keeps the model itself behind its Kawn platform.

Small Arabic/English model built in Khobar by injecting Arabic into an existing English model rather than pretraining from scratch; it is the base for both Mutarjim and Lahjawi. Misraj publishes its datasets and evaluation code openly but has released no Kuwain weights — the Hugging Face Misraj org hosts datasets only, and the model is reached through Misraj's Kawn platform.

Compact model tuned for Arabic/English RAG question-answering and entity extraction. Gemma-derived, so it ships under the Gemma Terms of Use; GGUF and 4-bit builds are published alongside it.

Gemma-based Arabic model that topped open Arabic rankings, outperforming much larger models. Because it is built on Gemma it inherits Google's Gemma Terms of Use rather than a standard open-source licence.

Largest model in the ALLaM family. SDAIA introduced the ALLaM family; HUMAIN adopted the 34B model and deployed it as the closed HUMAIN Chat service (Aug 2025). No weights, technical report or public API have been released, so there is no repository to link. An independent UI-level study evaluated it through HUMAIN Chat across MSA, five regional dialects and code-switching, but does not name those dialects.

Saudi national Arabic LLM built by the National Center for AI at SDAIA — 7B open weights, trained on 4T English tokens then 1.2T mixed Arabic/English tokens. The original ALLaM-AI Hugging Face org now redirects to humain-ai, so the weights resolve under HUMAIN's namespace; the model card still credits NCAI/SDAIA as the developer. The card claims MSA and English only.

TII's hybrid Transformer–Mamba series and its current open-weight flagship, released in sizes from 0.5B to 34B. Unlike Falcon 3, the model card lists Arabic among its 18 supported languages, making this the largest openly downloadable TII model with declared Arabic support.

Bilingual Arabic-English multimodal model built on Qwen2-VL and trained on 3.6M multimodal samples, roughly a third of them authentic Arabic. Strong on Arabic OCR and document understanding, with human evaluation across 17 Arab countries. MIT-licensed.

2.35B Arabic-first speech recognition trained on 300k+ hours, naming Gulf, Egyptian, Levantine and Maghrebi coverage plus Arabic-English code-switching. Its card claims the top place on the Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard — a leaderboard run by Elm, a Saudi company. Custom AudarAI Community Licence, not open source.

Open LLM family. The only model in this directory whose developer explicitly names a Saudi dialect: Qwen documents 119 languages and dialects including Arabic (Standard, Najdi, Levantine, Egyptian and others). Apache-2.0.

State-of-the-art open speech recognition covering 99+ languages and the default open ASR baseline for Arabic products, though Arabic is one language among many rather than a focus and dialectal Arabic remains its weak point. Note the licence inconsistency: this model card states Apache 2.0 while the openai/whisper GitHub repo and the large-v3-turbo card state MIT.

Arabic-centric flagship of the Fanar 2.0 release (Mar 2026), continually pretrained from google/gemma-3-27b-pt on ~166B Arabic, English and code tokens with 32K context. It adds native Arabic reasoning traces, selective thinking mode and tool calling. This repo is text-in/text-out; image generation, image understanding and poetry are separate Fanar-2 models.

Qatar's sovereign Arabic LLM. This 8.7B instruct model — the 'Prime' branch — continually pretrains google/gemma-2-9b on 1T Arabic and English tokens; a separate 7B 'Star' model was trained from scratch. The card claims MSA plus Gulf, Levantine and Egyptian dialects, and alignment with Islamic values and Arab culture.

First Arabic model in the Falcon series (May 2025), built on Falcon3-7B by extending the tokenizer with 32,000 Arabic-specific tokens and training on non-translated Arabic data. TII kept it closed: no weights are published under tiiuae — only the evaluation detail datasets — and the model is reachable through chat.falconllm.tii.ae. The announcement claims MSA plus unnamed 'key dialects'.

Successor to the Jais family, released as open weights in Aug 2026 in 8B and 70B chat sizes (plus GGUF builds). The card states it covers MSA, regional dialects and Arabic–English code-switching without naming the dialects. Repos are gated behind a contact-sharing agreement.

Landmark open Arabic LLM family (590M–70B), trained on Cerebras Condor Galaxy. The inceptionai org was renamed inception42, so the old repo URL only resolves via redirect; the repo is gated behind a contact-sharing agreement and has not been updated since Sept 2024. Superseded in practice by Jais 2.