Portugal releases Amalia, its first open-source large language model

The government-backed model comes with full training data and source code released publicly, and early pilots already target the Navy, museums and public administration.

Portugal has released Amalia, a national open-source large language model built with Portuguese universities and research institutions and unveiled at a launch ceremony in Lisbon, according to yournews.com. Prime Minister Luis Montenegro framed the project as a matter of digital sovereignty, telling attendees that Europe's strategic autonomy depends on building its own AI capacity rather than relying solely on foreign providers.

For Portugal's AI builders, the practical detail is what got released: the full model, its training datasets, and its source code, all under an open license. That's a different bet than the consumer chatbot play. Amalia is designed as a base layer that businesses, agencies, universities and developers can fine-tune into specialized tools, which puts the burden of application-building on the local ecosystem rather than on the state. The project drew €5.5 million from the EU's post-pandemic recovery program, according to yournews.com.

Training and running a model at this scale needs serious compute, and Amalia leans on Portugal's own supercomputers, Deucalion and MareNostrum 5, for both training and future iteration. That's the mechanism that makes a small country's sovereign-AI ambitions plausible: without national HPC capacity, an open weights release is just a file dump.

The move puts Portugal in the same lane as France's Mistral AI and Germany's Aleph Alpha, part of a broader EU push to reduce dependence on US model providers. Portugal is a smaller entrant with a smaller budget, so the test isn't whether Amalia can compete on benchmarks with those labs, but whether the open release actually gets adopted.

Several pilots are already in motion: a virtual guide for Portuguese museums, a decision-support system for the Navy, teaching assistants for lesson planning, and citizen-facing assistants for government services, per yournews.com. Whether those pilots ship and whether outside developers actually build on Amalia's open weights, rather than just watching from the sidelines, is the next thing to track.