Karnak — Egypt's Sovereign Arabic Large Language Model Powering Government AI Applications

On 11 February 2026, Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) launched Karnak, the country's first large-scale, state-built Arabic-English language model, at the Ai Everything MEA summit in Cairo. The publicly released Karnak-40B is a roughly 40-billion-parameter model built on Alibaba's Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct architecture, and the government describes it as ranking among the top-performing Arabic-language models in its size class.
Rather than a single product, Karnak is positioned as shared digital infrastructure: several flagship applications were unveiled alongside it, including SIA (an AI tutor for Arabic language and Egyptian history), AcQua (an NLP tool auditing citizen interactions with Digital Egypt call centres), Torgoman (an automated translation engine), BelMasry (a colloquial-Arabic NLP suite), and an AI legal assistant supporting public institutions and small businesses navigating Egypt's regulatory framework. The model can also run inside local data centres, which the government frames as a digital-sovereignty safeguard.
As of mid-2026, public information about Karnak is limited to capability benchmarks and the list of intended applications; no independent data on production accuracy, uptake, or measured efficiency gains for citizens or civil servants has been published.

Read the full analysis: https://itida.gov.eg/English/PressReleases/Pages/egypt-national-ai-karnak-llm-launch-Ai-Everything-MEA-2026.aspx