Is Pakistan Ready to Export AI, or Just the Talent That Builds It Abroad? Pakistan's National AI Policy talks about sovereign models and export revenue; meanwhile roughly 11,000 engineers left the country for work in a single year, and the industry's own leaders warn that AI training budgets risk turning into brain-drain subsidies unless retention is built in from day one.

Abstract

In February 2026, Islamabad issued its National AI Policy and, alongside it, the Islamabad Artificial Intelligence Declaration — language deliberately built around the idea of "sovereign AI," where model weights, training data, and inference infrastructure sit inside Pakistan and generate dollar export revenue rather than merely consuming it. It is an ambitious, arguably overdue framing for a country whose $4 billion-plus IT export sector has, until now, been built almost entirely on renting out engineering hours rather than owning products. Officials point to a pipeline of roughly 600,000 technology professionals and a stated target of Centres of Excellence graduating 100,000 to 150,000 AI-skilled students a year as evidence the raw material for that shift already exists.