Saudi AI Firm Launches Arabic Chatbot Rooted in Islamic Culture

Saudi artificial intelligence company Humaine has launched an AI chatbot designed to reflect Islamic values, Arabic culture, and Middle Eastern traditions, the company announced in a statement on Monday.

Named Humaine Chat, the chatbot is powered by the company’s proprietary large language model, “Allam,” which has been trained on one of the largest Arabic-language datasets to date. The tool is initially being rolled out in Saudi Arabia, with plans to expand across the Middle East and eventually to other regions globally.

The chatbot supports bilingual conversations in Arabic and English, and can also fluently understand regional dialects such as Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic.

According to Humaine, the Allam model was trained on data specifically aligned with Islamic, Middle Eastern, and cultural sensitivities, distinguishing it from global competitors like ChatGPT, which OpenAI has said is aligned with Western values.

The launch of Humaine Chat comes amid growing competition among startups and state-backed firms to lead in the emerging generative AI sector. Humaine, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), enters the field alongside other regional efforts like Abu Dhabi’s Falcon Arabic, launched earlier this year by a government-backed research initiative.

Humaine was formally announced just a day before U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in May. At its inception, the company signed multi-billion-dollar agreements with several American tech firms to build AI infrastructure within the Kingdom.

The dominance of English-language AI tools has created opportunities for regional companies to serve the 380 million Arabic speakers worldwide. While top global chatbots offer translation capabilities, they are typically trained primarily on English data and default to English interaction.

Models like Allam and Falcon aim to fill this gap, offering more accurate and culturally relevant results in Arabic compared to global platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or China’s DeepSeek.