MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models launches K2 Horizon, six fully open AI models up to 375B parameters

The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) announced K2 Horizon on September 3, 2026, describing a fleet of six AI foundation models ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters. A technology trade outlet, Silicon UK, separately reported the release the following day.

IFM says every model is released with weights, code, training data and methodology, allowing researchers and developers to inspect, reproduce and adapt them. Silicon UK characterized this as going beyond the open-weight approach used by major models developed in China, where models can be downloaded but source code and training methods are not disclosed.

The fleet spans a spectrum of deployment scenarios. The 0.9B model is aimed at tightly constrained devices such as watches and glasses, while the 3.7B and 7B models target phones and other on-device uses. The dense 32B and sparse 36B-A4B models are positioned for local hosting, and the 375B-A23B flagship is described as enterprise-ready.

The announcement makes superlative performance claims that have not been independently verified. IFM states the three smallest models achieve state-of-the-art results in their respective classes across mathematics, reasoning, software engineering and agentic capabilities, and that K2 Horizon is the largest fully open model release in AI history.

IFM founder and MBZUAI president Eric Xing framed the release around reproducibility rather than API access, saying meaningful AI progress depends on the ability to examine, build upon and improve technology. Hector Liu, director of IFM's Silicon Valley Research Lab, said the fleet lets developers prototype on the smallest model, scale to the flagship, and verify the organization's claims.

IFM says the models are available through Hugging Face, vLLM and SGLang, with an API offered through inference partners including Compass, Cerebras, AWS and Nebius. The models and code are released under the Apache 2.0 license.

The launch also fits a stated UAE strategy. IFM says the institute, established in May 2025, employs researchers across Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley and Paris, and that MBZUAI is training 80,000 federal employees as agentic AI experts. Silicon UK described the launch as part of the UAE's effort to become a global AI hub.

The core sourcing here is the announcing institution itself, and technical or performance claims have not been independently evaluated in the material we captured. The 'largest fully open model release' framing and state-of-the-art assertions should be read as institutional claims pending third-party review.