Egune AI builds Mongolian AI to fight digital colonization

Egune AI, Mongolia’s first sovereign artificial intelligence platform, is redefining what it means for a nation to control its technological future. Founded in 2019 as an offshoot of the Chimege speech recognition project, Egune is now offering a culturally grounded alternative to global AI giants—and issuing a call to action for other underrepresented nations.

“Even when tech giants like Google added partial Mongolian support, they failed to capture the nuances of our language or culture,” said Badral Sanlig, founder and CEO of Egune AI, in an exclusive interview. “We realized Mongolia needed its own sovereign AI—built on its language, its history, and its worldview.”

Sanlig and his team began their journey developing a speech-to-text engine, but the limitations of existing systems soon became apparent. Early prototypes of Egune performed simple tasks like controlling lights, yet Mongolian users needed much more—real-time local information, cultural fluency, and linguistic accuracy.

That challenge led Egune to build its own large language model, capable of converting traditional Mongolian script to Cyrillic and comprehending idioms that global AIs routinely misinterpret. One example: “нүүрээ барах,” a phrase signifying public shame and loss of dignity. According to Sanlig, ChatGPT-style models often mistranslate it as “pleasant face” or “covering one’s face.”
“It’s not just mistranslation—it’s cultural erasure,” Sanlig said.

Combating digital colonization

Egune AI’s mission is rooted in digital sovereignty—a concept Sanlig likens to controlling a national power grid.

“AI is the new electricity,” he said. “Yet most nations depend on U.S. or Chinese AI. Every government query to ChatGPT is a lesson for American models, sometimes revealing national secrets. That’s digital colonization disguised as convenience.”

Sanlig cited that over 90 percent of online content exists in dominant languages, leaving smaller linguistic communities to rely on machine translations. The result: a generation of Mongolians whose thought patterns are shaped by English grammar, despite speaking Mongolian.

“Young people aren’t to blame for poor language skills,” he said. “They’ve had Google Translate as their daily teacher for a decade.”

Building a sovereign foundation

Faced with limited training data and computing power, Egune AI adopted a resourceful strategy: digitizing Soviet-era books, transcribing old radio archives, and filtering out the synthetic content that accounted for 40 percent of online Mongolian text.

“We trained on 10 million clean Mongolian sentences,” Sanlig said. “It turns out quality beats quantity.”

The model also includes parallel neural pathways, enabling it to retain general knowledge on par with ChatGPT while developing culturally specific insight through native Mongolian texts.

“This isn’t translation—it’s bilingual cognition,” Sanlig explained. “Our model learns about democracy through both the American lens and Mongolia’s 1990 revolution.”

Features for real-world use

Egune Chat, the consumer-facing app, boasts 98 percent accuracy in speech recognition—even with rural dialects or informal speech.
“My grandmother can talk to it naturally,” Sanlig said. “ChatGPT can’t handle that.”

The platform also integrates hyperlocal data, offering real-time answers on public transit, weather, currency rates, and more—functionality that global AIs typically lack.

In the visual domain, Egune’s computer vision tools can identify Mongolian livestock, landscapes, and seasonal features. “Upload a photo of the countryside to ChatGPT, it sees grass,” said Sanlig. “Egune sees Mongolia.”

From skepticism to rapid adoption

Initial skepticism among Mongolian officials and tech elites gave way to widespread public use after Egune shifted its focus to ordinary citizens—herders, seniors, and schoolchildren. In just one month, daily active users jumped from 20,000 to 50,000.

“We stopped trying to be ‘smart’ and focused on being useful,” Sanlig said.

Egune now offers guidance to other underrepresented nations—particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa—on how to build sovereign AI systems.

“The first step is political awakening,” Sanlig said. “You need leaders who understand that foreign AI is a sovereignty risk.”

He recommends prioritizing authentic, human-generated data over synthetic translations and right-sizing infrastructure to local needs. Mongolia, with a population of 3 million, operates its national AI with computing resources that cost less than a single commercial airplane.

“Infrastructure needs are massively overhyped,” he added.

Coexistence, not competition

Egune doesn’t position itself as a rival to OpenAI or Google, but as a necessary alternative.

“OpenAI doesn’t offer on-premise deployment—Egune does,” Sanlig said. “We serve banks, governments, and healthcare systems that can’t legally or safely send data abroad.”

He called for global regulators to mandate AI equality across languages: “Half-functional AI is worse than none. It drives people to abandon their languages for access.”

Egune envisions a decentralized AI future—hundreds or thousands of sovereign AI systems interconnected globally, like national email services today.
“We’re not building one global AI,” said Sanlig. “We’re helping every culture build their own, while ensuring they can talk to each other.”