Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa University of Science and Technology has set a new global benchmark in artificial intelligence for the telecommunications sector. The university’s new TelecomGPT-R1, a 27 billion parameter reasoning model, has secured the top spot on the GSMA Open Telco Leaderboard, outperforming sophisticated open and closed-source systems built by major global technology companies.
Quick Facts
- TelecomGPT-R1 achieved a record 89.6% score.
- Developed by the university’s Digital Future Institute.
- Released openly under an Apache-2.0 licence.
A New Benchmark in Telecom AI
Developed by the university’s Digital Future Institute (DFI), TelecomGPT-R1 was launched at Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2026, one of the industry’s most significant annual events. The model achieved an average score of 89.6 percent, the highest result recorded on the GSMA leaderboard since its inception.
The system is specifically designed for complex telecom tasks, including reading 3GPP and O-RAN technical specifications, interpreting RAN logs, answering industry knowledge questions, and reasoning through network fault-analysis. Its performance surpasses both general-purpose and telecom-specific models from established tech players.
Open-Source and Cost-Efficient
In a significant move for the industry, Khalifa University has released TelecomGPT-R1 under an Apache-2.0 licence. This allows telecom operators, equipment vendors, and academic researchers to inspect, test, and adapt the model for their own networks without licensing fees.
The university’s team achieved this top-tier performance using a cost-efficient post-training recipe and smart optimisation, avoiding the massive training budgets typically associated with proprietary models. This approach to lowering computing costs while building a superior reasoning model is particularly relevant as the industry develops the new 6G standard, which will depend heavily on advanced AI.
A Two-Year Strategic Build-Up
This achievement is not a standalone project but the result of a two-year strategic effort. It builds on a partnership announced in November 2025 between the GSMA Foundry and Khalifa University’s 6G Research Centre.
The collaboration’s journey began in mid-2024 when the 6G Research Centre, working with Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute, built an early model that beat GPT-4 and Llama-3 on telecom-specific benchmarks. A second version was announced in November 2025, which paired the model with an Open Telco Knowledge Graph. The TelecomGPT-R1’s leaderboard victory marks the third major milestone in this sustained push to establish the UAE as a leader in open telecom AI development.
About Khalifa University
Khalifa University of Science and Technology is a world-class, multi-disciplinary research university based in Abu Dhabi, UAE. It focuses on advancing learning through teaching and research and on discovering and capitalizing on knowledge to support the UAE’s knowledge-based economy.
Source: MEAIN
