DUBAI: Saudi Arabia is the world leader for security, privacy and cryptography in artificial intelligence, and for the empowerment of women in AI, according to the 2026 AI Index Report by the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
The Kingdom ranks No. 1 globally in terms of female representation among AI inventors and authors, at 32.3 percent, ahead of Australia on 30.1 percent and Canada on 29.6 percent, a notably high proportion given the persistent gender gap across the AI field.
AI inventors and authors are distributed across a range of specializations globally, the report reveals. The most common fields include healthcare and bioinformatics, computer vision and image processing, and software engineering, which account for 10 percent or more of inventors in several countries.
Saudi Arabia has the highest share, 15 percent, of AI inventors working in the security, privacy and cryptography fields, followed by India on 13 percent and the UAE on 12 percent.
The Kingdom is also among a small group of countries with a positive net flow of AI talent, which the report defines as the difference between the number of AI authors and inventors arriving in and departing from a country.
Saudi Arabia recorded the fastest growth in any country’s share of AI talent globally, an increase of more than 100 percent between 2019 and 2025.
The report found that employees in emerging economies remain the most active users of AI in the workplace. More than 80 percent of respondents in Saudi Arabia, India and the UAE said they regularly use AI at work, with levels of trust in the technology in those countries similarly elevated.
That contrasts sharply with North America and Europe, where only about half of employees report regular use of AI tools, and trust levels of between 40 and 48 percent.
The adoption of generative AI among university students in the Kingdom also ranked among the highest globally, at 89 percent, compared with 67 percent in the US and UK.
The report highlighted Saudi efforts to expand the country’s AI ecosystem, including initiatives such as a $5 billion investment by Amazon Web Services and the Saudi state-backed AI company HUMAIN to develop an “AI Zone” in the Kingdom.
