Portugal releases Amália, open-source 9B parameter AI model trained on European Portuguese

Portugal has released Amália, its first national AI model trained specifically for European Portuguese, with the model's weights, training data, and source code all published under an open license. The 9 billion parameter model is built on EuroLLM-9B, a European foundation model, and represents a €5.5m initial investment through Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan.

Technical specifications

Amália—Automatic Multimodal Language Assistant with Artificial Intelligence—is based on the EuroLLM-9B foundation model. A team of more than 60 researchers and students expanded it with European Portuguese datasets, added a larger context window than the base model, strengthened safety and evaluation systems, and built in multimodal capabilities to handle both images and text.

The test version was completed in September 2025 and presented at the PROPOR conference in Brazil. Funding is secured through the end of 2027.

Deployment model: Infrastructure, not consumer product

Amália is not designed as a consumer-facing chatbot. Instead, it functions as foundational infrastructure that other software can call on. Planned applications 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.

The model is distributed through NOVA University Lisbon, Instituto Superior Técnico, and the universities of Porto, Minho, and Coimbra, coordinated with the Foundation for Science and Technology.

European Portuguese vs Brazilian Portuguese

European Portuguese differs significantly from Brazilian Portuguese in grammar, idiom, and cultural references. Large commercial models, trained predominantly on Brazilian Portuguese, tend to flatten these distinctions. Amália addresses this gap for Portugal's 10 million citizens and public services that require accurate cultural and linguistic register.

The release follows the OpenEuroLLM alliance and broader European efforts to reduce dependence on American and Chinese AI systems for foundational language tasks. It coincides with infrastructure investments including Nscale's €695m data-centre expansion in Portugal with Microsoft.

Open license details

Unlike commercial models accessed through APIs and usage fees, Amália ships with its weights, datasets, and code published under an open license. Governments, universities, and companies can inspect training data, adapt the model, and run it on their own hardware without recurring costs or dependencies on external providers.

This approach enables the auditing and verification that Portugal's government considers necessary for systems integrated into citizen services and military applications.

What this means

Portugal's release of Amália represents a concrete implementation of digital sovereignty—not just stated policy but functioning infrastructure with multi-year funding commitments. The model's value lies in its specificity: accurate European Portuguese for a defined user base, not a scaled-down competitor to GPT-4 or Claude. Success depends on actual adoption by universities, companies, and government departments over the next two years. Publishing the model is the easy part; integration into production systems is where most national AI projects stall. Portugal has structured funding and institutional coordination through 2027, which provides a realistic timeline to determine whether Amália becomes operational infrastructure or remains a well-documented research artifact.