TII’s Falcon-H1 Arabic sets global standard for Arabic AI

Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has unveiled Falcon-H1 Arabic, a large language model that establishes itself as the world’s leading Arabic artificial intelligence (AI) system, reinforcing the UAE’s ambition to compete with global leaders in high-performance AI.

Developed by TII, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), Falcon-H1 Arabic represents a fundamental architectural shift from previous Falcon models. Rather than relying solely on traditional transformer designs, the model is built on a hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture, enabling significantly higher accuracy and reasoning capability while operating with smaller parameter sizes.

According to TII, this architectural change has delivered immediate results. Falcon-H1 Arabic now tops the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard (OALL), outperforming Arabic and multilingual models several times its size across a broad range of language understanding, reasoning and cultural benchmarks.

The achievement marks a major milestone not only for TII, but for Arabic AI development more broadly. High-quality Arabic language models have historically lagged behind their UK counterparts, often constrained by limited datasets, weaker dialect coverage and lower reasoning performance. Falcon-H1 Arabic aims to close that gap decisively.

“This reflects our ongoing commitment to strengthening the UAE’s position as a global hub for advanced technology and responsible AI,” said Faisal Al Bannai, adviser to the UAE president and secretary general of ATRC. “By delivering models that support the linguistic and cultural needs of the region, we enable innovation that is accessible, relevant and impactful across our societies.”

TII says the models introduce significant improvements in data quality, dialect coverage, long-context stability and mathematical reasoning. These enhancements translate into more reliable and contextually accurate Arabic language understanding for real-world use cases, including document analysis, conversational AI, education platforms and enterprise knowledge management.

“By advancing architecture, data quality and long-context reasoning, we are creating enablers that unlock new possibilities in education, healthcare, governance and enterprise, all in Arabic,” said Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII. “This model represents an important step in our mission to deliver world-class AI that serves the region and contributes to global progress.”

Benchmark results underline the scale of the performance leap. On the OALL benchmark, which evaluates Arabic models across a wide range of linguistic and reasoning tasks, Falcon-H1 Arabic demonstrates clear leadership across all sizes. The 3B model achieves an average score of 61.87%, outperforming leading 4B competitors by more than 10 points. The 7B variant is surpassing all models, including systems developed in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. 

Another key advancement is the dramatic expansion of context length. Falcon-H1 Arabic supports context windows of up to 256,000 tokens, enabling analysis of lengthy legal contracts, medical records, academic research or enterprise documentation in a single interaction without loss of coherence.

“By improving efficiency, depth of understanding and language coverage, we are enabling AI systems that can better support institutions, developers and communities across the region,” said Hakim Hacid, chief researcher at TII’s Artificial Intelligence and Digital Research Centre.

Since 2023, TII’s Falcon models have consistently ranked at the top of regional and international benchmarks. With Falcon-H1 Arabic now leading across all Arabic model sizes, the UAE demonstrates that sovereign AI development can compete at the highest international level, while addressing the specific linguistic, cultural and operational needs of Arabic-speaking users.

The launch also underscores Abu Dhabi’s broader strategy to become a hub for high-performance AI research, creating tools that can drive enterprise efficiency, public sector innovation and educational advancement across the region. Falcon-H1 Arabic marks a new chapter for Arabic AI, combining world-class performance, cultural relevance and practical deployment readiness, a step that could accelerate AI adoption in the UAE and across the Middle East.