What Artificial Intelligence in Iraq Actually Consists Of
The primary sources on artificial intelligence in Iraq are few, and on 30 August 2026 one of the three government AI domains would not open, along with the .ai domain the advisory office still links to: the Arabic site reset the connection, and iraqi.ai stops at an expired certificate. What remains is readable in a day. Read it and one pattern dominates: much of what circulates as Iraqi achievement is a proposal quoted in the past tense.
Three bodies, one website with content, and a Gmail address
Three government bodies are routinely confused with one another. The Prime Minister's Advisory Office for Artificial Intelligence publishes at ai.gov.iq in English and arabic.ai.gov.iq in Arabic, and its front page states that the Iraqi AI team was established in 2023. The Iraqi National Center for Artificial Intelligence sits under the Prime Minister's office at nc.ai.gov.iq. Above both is the body whose Arabic name is اللجنة العليا للذكاء الاصطناعي, rendered "Supreme Committee for Artificial Intelligence" on ai.gov.iq and commonly translated "Higher Committee for Artificial Intelligence" elsewhere, including on the regulatory tracker Regulations.ai; this article uses Supreme Committee throughout. The Prime Minister chaired its first meeting in August 2024, and its third, reported by the Ministry of Planning on 3 February 2025, was chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Planning. I could not find the cabinet decision that created either the committee or the centre.
The National Center's site is a mission paragraph and nothing else: no news items, no projects listed, no leadership named, no founding date. The advisory office publishes considerably more, on a WordPress install whose front page still carries five plain-HTTP links to iraqi.ai, which redirect to HTTPS and stop at an expired certificate — leftover lightbox targets on carousel slides that actually open YouTube videos.
The only email address anywhere in that front page's source is iraqiaigroup@gmail.com, as a mailto link, rather than an address on a .gov.iq domain. Availability as tested on 30 August 2026: ai.gov.iq and nc.ai.gov.iq return 200, arabic.ai.gov.iq resets the connection, and iraqi.ai fails with an expired certificate. The project detail quoted throughout this article therefore comes from the live English pages, which are the ones currently readable.
The national strategy has been in preparation for two years
The strategy is widely described as launched in late 2024, and the primary record does not support that. The regulatory tracker Regulations.ai logs it as a draft, under the name INSAIN, formally reviewed at the Supreme Committee's first meeting in August 2024 under Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, and states that it is "currently a draft policy, not a binding law", with the launch date of its implementation website listed as TBD. The Ministry of Planning's own archive is sharper still: at the committee's third meeting, reported on 3 February 2025, the scientific adviser Dia al-Jumaili presented a roadmap for building national capabilities in preparation for developing a national AI strategy.
By the government's own account, then, no strategy existed in February 2025. Iraq Business News reported an expanded Planning ministry meeting on 26 April 2026 still working towards measurable objectives. I found no published text of a strategy, though an adoption I missed cannot be ruled out.
The advisory office's live project index lists ten projects and no more: 100 schools, genetic fingerprinting, oil and gas, water, agriculture, transport, cybercrime, construction and housing, the language model, and heritage preservation. Open the pages and the verbs hold steady. Water: the final report was submitted, and the page states that the project must still be presented to the Council of Ministers to be officially approved before it can enter the National Water Strategic Plan. Oil and gas: a study on a safe national framework for adopting AI in the sector was submitted to the Ministry of Oil. The schools project is titled for 100 schools, and its own recommendation asks for an initial operating budget to implement a first phase of ten to twenty model schools.
One line on those pages resists explanation. Among the next steps listed on the genetic fingerprinting page, live in English, is: "Starting a pilot project to implement the database in a Brazilian security institution." It sits in a document about Iraqi genetic data, and I cannot account for it.
- Regulations.ai entry for Iraq's draft national AI strategy
- Ministry of Planning: third meeting of the committee, reported 3 February 2025
- Iraq Business News: AI strategy meeting at the Ministry of Planning, 26 April 2026
- Smart Water Management Project page
- Equipping 100 Schools with AI Laboratories
- Preparing the National Policy for Genetic Fingerprinting
The sovereign Iraqi model is a funding request
The project page for a large Iraqi language model is live in English on ai.gov.iq. It describes a team formed under the Supreme Committee and drawn from Iraqi universities, the National Data Center and the Media and Communications Authority, working under the direct supervision of the Advisor to the Prime Minister for Scientific Affairs and Artificial Intelligence. Planned scale is a range: "gradual training according to designated areas from 7 to 30B parameters". Planned tooling is open-source libraries, "Hugging Face or DeepSpeed". Training would run on national servers inside the national data centre, on GPU clusters described as scalable.
The page carries no GPU count, no compute figure, no dataset size, no date and no budget. The expected output is named as an "Iraqi custom language model IraqGPT or similar", so even the name is unfixed. The first of its four recommendations asks that the project be supported "financially and technically within the 2025-2026 budget"; the fourth recommends "establishing a national center for research in linguistic artificial intelligence", which is to say that none exists. Nothing on the page claims that a model has been trained.
The regional comparison is a matter of public record rather than opinion, because the comparators publish their weights and anyone can download them and check. Sizes below are the ones actually published on Hugging Face, not the ones announced.
In January 2026 Alsumaria reported the birth of the first local language model in Iraq: YILDO-LLM-100M, 100 million parameters, credited to Yildirim Salah al-Din Hussein, an academic in the statistics department at the University of Kirkuk, together with three named co-authors. For scale, the smallest published GPT-2 has 124 million parameters. One outlet carried the report, on 8 January 2026, and it links to no weights, no paper and no repository; I found none elsewhere either. The parameter count belongs in any sentence that repeats the claim.
| Model | Maker | Published sizes | Licence | Weights and paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jais family | Inception and Cerebras Systems | Eight sizes, 590M to 70B | Apache-2.0 | Downloadable; paper arXiv 2308.16149 |
| ALLaM | National Center for AI at SDAIA, Saudi Arabia | 7B instruct preview | Apache-2.0 | Downloadable; paper at ICLR 2025, OpenReview MscdsFVZrN |
| Fanar | Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University | 8.7B | Apache-2.0 | Downloadable; paper arXiv 2501.13944 |
| IraqGPT (proposed) | Team under the Supreme Committee for AI | 7 to 30B, planned only | Not stated | None; no model reported trained |
Iraq's index score carries a methodology footnote
Oxford Insights published its Government AI Readiness Index 2024 in December 2024, covering 188 countries. Iraq scores 40.91 overall: 32.60 on the Government pillar, 35.87 on the Technology Sector pillar, 54.25 on Data and Infrastructure. Sorting the published table by overall score puts it 107th. The Middle East and North Africa regional average is 48.50 and the global average 47.59.
A 2025 edition exists, which matters for anyone quoting the paragraph above. Oxford Insights released it in December 2025, covering 195 governments, and states on the index page that it has "updated the Government AI Readiness Index methodology" to reflect governments acting as buyers, enablers and regulators rather than only as implementers of public services. In that edition Iraq scores 29.37 overall, which is 128th of 195 in the dataset the index page itself carries. The pillar names changed completely, so the two editions do not sit on one line: every other figure in this section is from the 2024 index and is not comparable with 2025.
The part nobody quotes is which pillar is weakest. It is Government, at 32.60, not Data and Infrastructure at 54.25. That ordering does not make Iraq's data and infrastructure good: 54.25 sits below the global average for that same pillar, 59.62. It is the least bad of three low scores, which is a different claim from a strength.
The methodology section carries a footnote that mentions Iraq by name. Only countries with values for more than half the indicators were included in the final index at all, and Iraq cleared that bar. But for eleven countries, the report says, peer-group mean imputation "was not possible for some missing indicators as they were either the sole country in their peer group or in a peer group in which all countries were missing data for that indicator". Iraq is on that list. So are Canada and the United States, which is the clearest sign that the footnote is a note about how peer groups were constructed rather than a verdict on Iraqi statistics. The report does not say which of the two conditions applied to Iraq.
Quote the rank with its year attached. Shafaq, in a report published in August 2026, gave 107th and 40.91 as the Government AI Readiness Index 2025; those are the 2024 figures. Separately, Jummar reports that Dr Ammar Hussein, secretary of the Supreme Committee for Artificial Intelligence, said in late 2024 that Iraq had reached 77th globally and 9th among Arab countries in the Global AI Index. Tortoise Media's index of that name covers 83 countries, but I could not open its ranking data to confirm that Iraq appears in it, so that 77th cannot responsibly be converted into a position from the bottom.
Physical supply is what bounds a training run
The index scores Iraq's data and infrastructure above its government, and that is a statement about data policy, connectivity and physical telecoms indicators. The pillar does count supercomputers, by way of the Top500 list, and never counts the power to run them. It is not a statement about megawatts, and the two come apart at precisely the point where someone tries to train a model on national servers. The 2025 edition scores compute capacity on its own, and Iraq gets 2.08 there, against 90.92 for the United States. The US Energy Information Administration's Iraq brief, updated in July 2025, puts Federal Iraq's available peak electricity generation supply in 2024 at an estimated 25 GW, against the 48 GW needed to meet peak summer demand. Federal Iraq generated an estimated 150 TWh in 2023, up from 134 TWh in 2022, about 99 per cent of it from oil and natural gas; the Kurdistan Regional Government generated at most 17 TWh in 2024.
Two Iran-related figures are routinely welded together and should not be. Iraq reports, in EIA's wording, that natural gas imports from Iran account for more than 30 per cent of electricity generation, and that gas keeps flowing. Separately, Iraq also imported electricity directly from Iran, which made up only about 2 per cent of Federal Iraq's total supply in 2023, under a sanctions waiver the United States revoked in March 2025, after which those imports stopped. The waiver ended the 2 per cent, not the 30.
Connectivity figures do not reconcile, and the gap between them is the useful part. DataReportal counts 38.0 million internet users in Iraq at the start of 2025, 81.7 per cent of a population it puts at 46.5 million. Shafaq, citing the Ministry of Communications, reports about 21.4 million internet subscribers and describes the population as 45 million. The 81.7 per cent is users over one base; the 21.4 million is subscriptions on another; neither can be checked against the other without saying which quantity and which base it used.
Fibre is the sharpest figure available. Subscriptions rose 413.9 per cent during 2024, from 216,800 to about 1.1 million, on numbers Shafaq attributes to the Commission of Statistics and Geographic Information Systems. Excluding the Kurdistan Region, fibre-to-the-home lines totalled 716,388, of which Baghdad held 253,080. Dhi Qar governorate is recorded at zero, though in a summary table a reporting gap and a true zero look identical.
The legal floor is being rebuilt rather than standing. The advisory office's own cybercrime page describes the work as reviewing the current cybercrime law and developing a modern, comprehensive one in line with technical change, with a joint legal and technical team formed to produce the draft: a redraft in progress, not an enactment. Jummar reported in August 2025 that Iraq's Digital Media Centre had disclosed in 2023 that personal data from several official websites was leaked, including hundreds of thousands of entries from the ministries of Higher Education and Education, and that an arrest was made in April 2025 over an attack on private companies that leaked around 1,500 gigabytes.
The things that are actually delivered carry dates
The University of Baghdad's College of Artificial Intelligence opened for the 2025-2026 academic year, inaugurated in the presence of the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Naim al-Aboudi, and the university's president. It has three departments: big data, biomedical applications and engineering applications. In Erbil, Kurdistan24 reported in November 2025, quoting the university's own media director, that Salahaddin University had opened an artificial intelligence department inside its College of Information Technology and Informatics and had begun accepting students that year, and described it as the first such department in the Kurdistan Region. That superlative comes from the university, not from an independent count.
Below the universities, delivery thins. At the Supreme Committee meeting reported on 3 February 2025, the Minister of Education described preparing infrastructure for more than 37,000 government and private school administrations, which is the ministry's own figure and counts administrations rather than buildings, and said computing and AI material had already entered the curriculum for the first and second intermediate grades. Separately, the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research announced IQ LEARN, a smart-learning platform for university education, on 5 February 2026; its own post gives no address for the platform, linking instead to a Zoom recording of the presentation. Jummar supplies the classroom view: at Wasit University the AI course was purely theoretical because the computers could not run Python, against the University of Technology teaching machine learning properly.
The research is real and small. Iraqi institutions have published dialect corpora including CIAD, built from Iraqi Twitter feeds for sentiment analysis, and IQAD, built from unspecified social media for dialect classification, and the Ghadeer speech corpus, recorded from 210 speakers at the College of Media in Baghdad. Their authors say repeatedly that online sources for Iraqi Arabic are few.
The private sector is where the search results fail worst, and where I have least to offer. No census of Iraqi AI companies exists. Startup trackers list a handful, but the Tracxn page for AI startups in Iraq returned 404 when I tried to open it, so I cannot report even a tracker's count. The pages that rank the country's top twenty AI companies come from directories where firms enter themselves, with nothing verifying the entries. Naming companies on that basis would give a reader nothing checkable, so this article names none.
The short version
Sort every Iraqi AI claim into three boxes before repeating it: delivered, with a date and a name; underway, with a committee and a study; announced, with a paragraph and no address. Baghdad's College of Artificial Intelligence is in the first box. IraqGPT, which is a budget request, is in the third.
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