HUMAIN Chat and ALLaM: Saudi Arabia's own AI, and how it compares to ChatGPT

ALLaM is the Arabic and English language model built by SDAIA, the Saudi Data and AI Authority. HUMAIN Chat is the app HUMAIN, the Public Investment Fund's AI company, launched on top of it in August 2025. So the short answer to "who made it" is both: SDAIA built the model, and HUMAIN turned it into a product.

Customers ask me some version of the same question every few weeks: should we use HUMAIN Chat, or keep using ChatGPT? Most of the confusion comes from not knowing who does what, so I start there.

What is ALLaM?

ALLaM (علّام) is a family of large language models trained for Arabic and English. It was developed by the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI), which sits inside SDAIA, starting in 2023. The research paper describes models trained from scratch at 7 billion parameters, and larger versions that started from Meta's Llama 2 and were then trained further on Arabic and English text.

It has been publicly usable for a while, even if few people noticed:

• IBM watsonx added the 13B instruct model in May 2024, as the first ALLaM model with open access.
• Microsoft Azure followed later in 2024, and ALLaM 2 7B Instruct now sits in the Azure AI Foundry model catalog.
• Hugging Face got ALLaM 7B Instruct in 2025, under the Apache 2.0 licence, so any developer can download and run it.

The newest version, ALLaM 34B, is the one HUMAIN uses. HUMAIN describes it as a new foundation model built from scratch rather than an update to the earlier releases.

What is HUMAIN, and how does it relate to SDAIA?

HUMAIN was launched in May 2025 as a PIF-owned company, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to build and sell AI across the whole stack: data centres, cloud infrastructure, models and applications.

The easiest way to keep the two apart:

• SDAIA sets the rules and does the research. It owns the national data and AI strategy, its NCAI built ALLaM, and it is also the regulator for the Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL).
• HUMAIN builds the business. It takes national capabilities like ALLaM and ships them as products companies and consumers can buy and use. Even the ALLaM page on Hugging Face now sits under HUMAIN's organisation.

What is HUMAIN Chat?

HUMAIN Chat is a conversational AI app, similar in idea to ChatGPT, launched on 25 August 2025 on the web, iOS and Android. It runs on ALLaM 34B and launched in Saudi Arabia first, with regional and global rollout planned after that.

What HUMAIN highlights about it:

• Answers that can pull from live web search.
• Voice input that understands Arabic dialects, not only Modern Standard Arabic.
• Switching between Arabic and English in the same conversation.
• Data hosted inside the Kingdom, in line with the PDPL.

The last point is HUMAIN's own claim, and it is the one most of my customers care about.

Is ChatGPT available in Saudi Arabia?

Yes. ChatGPT works in Saudi Arabia on the free and paid plans, and many teams here use it every day. So the real question is not access. It is which tool fits which job, and where your data goes when you use it.

HUMAIN Chat vs ChatGPT: how do they compare?

A comparison table only gets you so far. These tools change every few months, and benchmark scores rarely match how a model handles your own documents and your own customers.

Which one should a Saudi business use?

Here is how I would decide:

• Customer-facing Arabic. If your users write and speak in Saudi or Gulf dialect, test HUMAIN Chat and ALLaM seriously. Getting tone and dialect right matters more here than raw reasoning power.
• Personal or classified data. If prompts will contain customer records or anything covered by the PDPL or NDMO classification, where the data is processed matters as much as answer quality. I covered the rules in detail in my guide to data sovereignty in Saudi Arabia.
• Coding, complex analysis and integrations. Global models and their ecosystems still have the head start. For internal work on public or non-sensitive information, ChatGPT and its peers remain the easier choice.

Before committing, run a simple test. Take 20 real prompts from your team, in the mix of Arabic and English they actually use, and run them through both tools. Have the people who would use the answers score them. Then put the data location question to both vendors in writing. An afternoon of this tells you more than any launch announcement.

What is HUMAIN ONE?

HUMAIN ONE is HUMAIN's platform for businesses that want AI agents to do work, not just answer questions. It was unveiled at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh in October 2025, built on ALLaM, and aimed first at back-office work like HR, finance and procurement. In May 2026, HUMAIN and AWS announced they would run it on AWS, sell it through AWS Marketplace, and use the upcoming AWS region in Saudi Arabia. That region is announced but not live yet, as I explain in which cloud providers actually run in Saudi Arabia.

For most enterprises, this is the part to watch. A chat app is useful, but the value I see in practice comes from agents connected to real systems, the jump that, as I wrote in why AI projects stall between pilot and production, most organisations here still struggle to make.