'Urdu AI model Buraq to keep data at home'

Minister says identity, Raast & WASL exchange must come before AI can scale

SEOUL:

Pakistan is building Buraq, its own large language model trained on Urdu and regional languages, and procuring sovereign compute capacity so that Pakistani data is processed within Pakistan, Federal Minister for IT and Telecom said at the Global AI and Digital Summit 2026 in Seoul.

The minister told a World Bank panel on digital government service delivery that the model, and the public compute capacity behind it, form the AI layer of a programme built on four foundations, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of IT on Wednesday.

On digital identity, the National Database and Registration Authority provides verified identity to more than 100 million Pakistanis, now extended into a digital identity that authenticates citizens online and records and enforces consent. On payments, the State Bank's Raast instant payment rail turns an AI model's identification of a qualifying household into delivery.

On data, WASL, the national exchange layer of the Digital Public Infrastructure stack built under the World Bank-supported Digital Economy Enhancement Project, lets institutions share data with every transaction authenticated, encrypted and logged. A citizen Super App and the National Open Data Ecosystem sit on top. On safeguards, the National Data Governance Policy sets a single rulebook for classifying, sharing, protecting and publishing public data.

Governments that skip the foundations get pilots that never scale and systems citizens do not trust, she said. AI is the last layer, not the first.