AI models tested for Arabic

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.

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.

Efficient open-weight model common in regional stacks; v0.3 is the current 7B instruct release and remains Apache 2.0. Arabic is not a declared language on the card. Note that Mistral's larger flagships moved to the non-open Mistral Research Licence, so the permissive terms apply to this size, not the family.

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.

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.

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 Superseded in practice by Jais 2.