Halal-GPT: Saudi company Humain launches ’Islamic AI chatbot’

Saudi AI company Humain has launched an Arabic-language AI chatbot that it says is “fluent in Islamic culture, values and heritage”.

Humain Chat is powered by the company’s Allam large language model, which is trained on one of the largest Arabic datasets ever assembled, the company said in a statement on Monday.

The chatbot will be first made available in Saudi Arabia before being rolled out across the Middle East and eventually the rest of the world.

It currently supports bilingual conversations in English and Arabic, and is fluent in some colloquial dialects including Egyptian and Lebanese.

The company said the Allam model has been trained on data sets in “deep alignment with Islamic, Middle Eastern, and cultural nuance”.

This is similar to the world’s leading chatbot ChatGPT, which its developer OpenAI says has been built to align with Western values.

The launch of Humain Chat comes as startups and state-backed companies race to establish themselves as regional leaders in the nascent technology.

Humain, owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, is competing with a similar large language model launched by the Abu Dhabi government’s research arm earlier this year, Falcon Arabic.

The company was announced a day before US president Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in May, when it signed multi-billion-dollar deals with American technology companies to build AI infrastructure in the kingdom.

The dominance of the English language in the industry has provided an opportunity for companies in the region to develop AI apps capable of providing native language services to the world’s 380 million Arabic-speakers.

Though capable of translation, chatbots created by the world’s leading AI companies default to English and are trained predominantly on English-language datasets.

Models such as Allam and Falcon are capable of providing more detailed output in Arabic than the most powerful algorithms offered by ChatGPT,  Google Gemini, and China’s DeepSeek.