Saudi Arabia’s new national AI company, HUMAIN, has officially launched its conversational AI platform, HUMAIN Chat, powered by the newly developed ALLaM 34B large language model. The rollout marks the first time internet users in the Kingdom can access the latest version of ALLaM, a sovereign Arabic-centric LLM trained and fine-tuned specifically for Saudi culture, values, and language use.
The new application debuts with a feature set designed to rival global chat platforms while focusing on Arabic speakers, including real-time web search, speech input across multiple Arabic dialects, bilingual switching between Arabic and English within the same conversation, and compliance with Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL).
According to HUMAIN, ALLaM 34B has been benchmarked by Cohere as the most advanced Arabic LLM developed in the Arab world, achieving near-parity with global proprietary systems on reasoning tests. The model was developed by a team of more than 120 AI specialists, including 35 PhDs with a 50:50 gender ratio, trained on one of the largest proprietary Arabic datasets assembled to date. Over 600 domain experts and 250 evaluators contributed feedback to ensure cultural authenticity and alignment with Islamic values.
HUMAIN Chat is initially restricted to Saudi users but will expand to the wider Middle East and eventually global markets. The company says the model is designed to serve over 400 million Arabic speakers and the broader Muslim population worldwide, long underserved by mainstream generative AI platforms.
“This facility is more than capital — it is a catalyst to enhance our capabilities, and help us build resilient and intelligent food supply chains driven by speed, transparency, and trust,” said HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin, noting the app represents “a benchmark moment for sovereign AI systems in Arabic.”
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ALLaM has been in development since 2023, when Saudi Arabia’s National Centre for AI (NCAI) under SDAIA (Saudi Data & AI Authority) released the first pilot versions. Iterations of ALLaM were later hosted on IBM’s Watsonx and Microsoft Azure, as well as Hugging Face previews in early 2025. With HUMAIN’s establishment in May 2025 through the merger of SCAI, SDAIA’s AI model team, and other national technology units, the company formally took ownership of ALLaM’s roadmap.
HUMAIN is now positioning ALLaM 34B not just as an incremental release, but as a new foundation model built from scratch, with sovereign hosting and integration into a full HUMAIN Chat suite. The launch comes amid rising competition between Gulf AI champions, with the UAE’s G42 and international players like OpenAI and Anthropic also racing to develop Arabic and multilingual capabilities.
