Pakistan's government has announced Buraq, an Urdu AI model that it says will keep Pakistani data within national borders. IT and Telecom Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja made the announcement on October 22 at a World Bank summit in Seoul. Buraq is designed to understand and generate text in Urdu and other regional languages, and it remains in development.
Why the government is building its own model
Urdu accounts for just 0.03 percent of the web content gathered by Common Crawl, a large public archive of web pages that is widely used to train AI systems. Because the language is so thinly represented, most AI models struggle with it. The government therefore decided to build its own model from scratch rather than rely on tools trained mainly on other languages.
Khawaja also spoke at the Global AI and Digital Summit 2026, held in Seoul from October 19 to 22. At that event she said Pakistan became the first country to sign the Digital and AI Compact. She argued that AI should come after basic digital foundations are in place, not before them.
Funding, data hosting and digital foundations
The government has committed $1 billion through 2030 to AI, regulatory changes and public-sector AI projects. Those projects include AI use in welfare, healthcare and tax systems. Pakistan also plans domestic computing capacity so that Buraq's data processing stays inside the country. A first local AI cloud was recently launched through a partnership between Telenor Pakistan and Data Vault Pakistan.
Khawaja said Buraq will be built on four digital foundations. These include NADRA's identity system, which serves more than 100 million Pakistanis, and the State Bank's Raast system for instant payments. WASL, the national platform for secure data sharing between government agencies, is also part of that base. Separately, the National Data Governance Policy sets rules for how government data is stored, shared and protected.
Human oversight and open questions
Khawaja stressed that AI should help people make decisions rather than make them on their behalf. She said the government will keep people in a supervisory role over every AI system it runs. For a model that is still early, that principle is a stated commitment rather than a tested practice.
Buraq does not yet have a website or public demo. No release date has been announced, and no technical specifications have been shared. Until more details are published, the minister's statements are the main public information about the Urdu AI model.
Aasan alfaaz mein
Pakistan ne Buraq naam ka Urdu AI model ka elaan kiya hai, jo Pakistani data ko mulk ke andar rakhne ka wada karta hai. Yeh model Urdu aur dusri regional zubanon mein text samajh aur bana sakega, lekin abhi is ka koi public demo, website ya release date nahi hai. Government ne AI ke liye $1 billion tak ka funding 2030 tak rakhne ka elaan kiya hai. Aam logon ke liye abhi koi naya app nahi aaya, lekin aage chal kar sarkari khidmat Urdu mein behtar ho sakti hain.
