Saudi Arabia National AI Curriculum — K-12 AI literacy for six million students

Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Education, with the National Centre for Curriculum Development, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, and the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA), launched a K-12 AI curriculum for the 2025-2026 academic year, described as the first grade-stratified AI education programme in the MENA region and reaching more than six million government-school students.

The curriculum began with a pilot elective, 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence', for third-year high-school students in the general track in early 2025, before extending to all grade levels with age-appropriate modules progressing from foundational algorithmic thinking in primary school to applied machine learning and ethics in secondary education. Content spans computational thinking, data literacy, ethical AI in regional and cultural context, and Arabic-language AI resources, with project-based learning emphasised; learning outcomes feed into the national student performance assessment system. Teacher professional development is being coordinated across the 500,000+ teaching workforce, though independently verified completion data have not been published.

The initiative sits within Vision 2030's Human Capability Development Program. SDAIA's parallel SAMAI ('One Million Saudis in AI') programme had registered over 500,000 participants by mid-2025, with some reports citing 1 million trained by late 2025 (figures differ across sources). No independent evaluation of student learning outcomes had been published as of mid-2026; the scale of rollout is unambiguous but evidence of pedagogical effectiveness remains preliminary.