Portugal open-sources Amália, its first national AI model for European Portuguese

Portugal has released Amália, its first national AI model built specifically for European Portuguese, and it has done so in about the most deliberate way a government can. The model, its training data, and its source code are all open, free for governments, universities, and companies to take and build on. This release is part of a growing European push to build sovereign AI and reduce dependence on US and Chinese systems for something as foundational as language.

What happened

Amália is built on EuroLLM-9B, a European foundation model, which a team of more than 60 researchers and students expanded with European Portuguese datasets, a larger context window, stronger safety and evaluation systems, and the ability to handle images alongside text. The name is an acronym for Automatic Multimodal Language Assistant with Artificial Intelligence, also reaching for Amália Rodrigues, the fado singer whose voice is bound up with Portuguese identity.

The project has drawn an initial €5.5 million through Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan, with money flowing to NOVA University Lisbon, Instituto Superior Técnico, and the universities of Porto, Minho, and Coimbra, coordinated with the Foundation for Science and Technology. A test version was finished in September 2025 and presented at the PROPOR conference in Brazil. Funding has already been secured through the end of 2027.

Why AI builders should care

Amália is not a rival to ChatGPT in the way most people would encounter one. It will not ship as a consumer chat app. It is designed instead to sit underneath other things, as the layer that other software calls on. The planned uses include an AI teaching assistant, a virtual guide for Portuguese museums and monuments, a digital assistant for citizen services, and decision-support tools for the Portuguese Navy.

For AI builders, this distinction explains a good deal about why the state is giving the model away rather than charging for access to it. A model a government intends to wire into citizen services and naval decision-support is one it wants to be able to audit, not just trust, and open publication is the surest way to keep that option.

Amália’s strongest card is specificity. European Portuguese is not Brazilian Portuguese, and the big commercial models, trained overwhelmingly on the latter, tend to flatten the difference. A system that gets the grammar, the idiom, and the cultural references right is useful in a way that a larger, blurrier one is not, and that gap matters most for public services expected to speak to citizens in their own register rather than an approximation of it.

Practical implications

Open, in this case, means open. Where the large commercial systems are closed boxes accessed through an interface and a bill, Amália ships with its weights, its datasets, and its code published under an open licence, so that anyone can inspect how it was trained, adapt it, and run it on their own hardware. That choice is partly ideological and partly practical.

The release lands squarely inside Europe’s wider unease about depending on American and Chinese systems for something as foundational as language. It follows the OpenEuroLLM alliance, the cross-border effort to train open models on the continent’s own languages, and a run of infrastructure bets that includes Nscale’s €695m data-centre push in Portugal with Microsoft.

Caveats

The harder question is adoption. Publishing a model openly is one thing. Getting universities, companies, and government departments to actually build on it is another, and that second step is where most sovereign-AI ambitions quietly run out of road. Portugal has funded Amália through 2027 and named the institutions meant to carry it forward. The next two years will show whether it becomes real infrastructure or a well-documented research project with a beautiful name.

FAQs

What is Amália and who developed it?

Amália is the first national AI model designed for European Portuguese, developed as a collaborative government-led project built on EuroLLM-9B. It is built with European Portuguese datasets and dedicated safety and evaluation enhancements by a team of more than 60 researchers and students from NOVA University Lisbon, Instituto Superior Técnico, and the universities of Porto, Minho, and Coimbra.

Is Amália open-source and how can I inspect its data and code?

Yes, Amália ships with its weights, datasets, and code under an open license, allowing anyone to inspect how it was trained, adapt it, and run it on their own hardware.

What is EuroLLM-9B and how does Amália relate to it?

EuroLLM-9B is a European foundation model. Amália is built on top of it and extended with European Portuguese data, a larger context window, stronger safety and evaluation systems, and multimodal capabilities.

Who funded Amália and which institutions are involved?

Funding of €5.5 million comes from Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan, supporting NOVA University Lisbon, Instituto Superior Técnico, and the universities of Porto, Minho, and Coimbra, coordinated with the Foundation for Science and Technology. Funding has been secured through the end of 2027.