MBZUAI releases Jais 3, a family of open Arabic models built to act as agents

The Institute of Foundation Models at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi released Jais 3 on October 15, 2026, a set of six open Arabic-first language models ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters. It was built with Inception and Cerebras on top of the institute's own K2 Horizon open models.

The team says Jais 3 is meant to do work, not just chat: plan multi-step tasks, call tools and MCP servers, run terminal commands, search the web, and edit Arabic PDFs, slide decks and spreadsheets while talking to the user in Arabic. It covers Modern Standard Arabic, dialects such as Emirati and Egyptian, and Arabizi, Arabic written in Latin letters. Most sizes have a 512,000 token context window. The smallest is meant for phones, while the 375B mixture-of-experts flagship, with about 23 billion active parameters, needs a full eight-GPU node.

On the institute's own tests, the 375B model has the highest Arabic average of the open models it compared and edges past Claude Sonnet 5, though GPT-5.6 Sol and Gemini 3.8 Flash stay ahead. The 7B model beats the previous 70B Jais 2 on Arabic. Weights, training checkpoints, recipes and cleaned-up Arabic benchmarks are released under Apache 2.0.

Why it matters

Strong open models for non-English languages let local companies and governments build agents in their own language without relying on foreign APIs.

Source: Institute of Foundation Models, MBZUAI