Autocratic UAE gets democratic artificial intelligence

OpenAI’s stated plan to stop the spread of tech-driven authoritarianism by helping oppressive Gulf autocracy UAE deliver artificial intelligence (AI) services that uphold democratic values across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia has been met with some skepticism from experts.

But the US generative AI (GenAI) firm has declared it is preempting China’s ambition to become a world leader in “autocratic AI” and propagate systems that will help authoritarian states around the world oppress their people, crush dissent, stifle speech and spread propaganda. 

OpenAI said its “Stargate UAE” deal in May was its first act in that endeavour. In collaboration with the US government and the European Union (EU), it was creating a global, “democratically powered AI network”, building infrastructure across 10 countries to run the GPT GenAI models it was building to uphold the principles of democracy, free expression and free markets.

In the UAE, that involved building a 1GW datacentre – a site three times larger than the computing power of the entire country, and as much again as was built, being built or planned. Created to serve the government and public sector of one of the most oppressive regimes in the world with services from a “democratic AI” model, it would serve UAE citizens, too, as well as states in a 2,000-mile radius across the Middle East, North and East Africa, South and East Europe, and Central and West Asia, its reach is determined by the point at which communications become so slow that the latency interferes. 

The Gulf regime may not have committed not to use AI as an instrument of authoritarian control, but Valentin Weber, one of the world’s leading experts on China’s global dissemination of technology designed to empower autocratic rule, believed the OpenAI deal put a line in the sand, forcing the UAE to choose between the US and China. 

“Increasing US involvement in the UAE will dent adoption of Chinese technology in the country,” said Weber, a senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

But “the threat of China’s AI in the Middle East is real”, he wrote in an email. “Chinese AI technology that is already deployed is going to persist in UAE public surveillance/security systems for some time.”

Sphere of influence

The Stargate deal deepened UAE entanglement in the US technological sphere of influence, which began last year when it severed ties with Huawei, to satisfy Microsoft’s $1.5bn investment in Emirati state-owned AI and datacentre conglomerate G42, said Weber. 

Microsoft and other US investors had also put $100bn into UAE-state AI investor MGX. The OpenAI deal brought G42 into the partnership, creating Stargate US, Japanese investor Softbank, and US computer firms Nvidia, Oracle and Cisco.

The UEA had already agreed to invest $1.4tn in OpenAI’s US Stargate infrastructure and similar projects when US president Donald Trump went to oversee the Stargate UAE deal in May. 

Days before they agreed the investment, lobby group Freedom House ranked the Gulf monarchy among the worst countries in the world for political rights and civil liberties, far below global standards. 

It is an authoritarian state ruled by powerful families, which punishes political dissent, has no political transparency or independent media, with academia infected with political indoctrination and granted almost no freedom. It represses free expression through surveillance and retribution, dominates people’s political views, and has a corrupt legal system with no independent judiciary, said Freedom House. It has no elections, no right to organise, no tolerance of human rights organisations, and almost no equal opportunity, free movement, female agency, or protection against violence and control at home. 

By laws it uses to silence journalists, dissidents, activists, government critics and social media users, it has jailed scores of people, Human Rights Watch said in its annual report. 

“UAE has invested a lot in AI, not for democracy, but to deepen its connections with the US and China, and for increased repression, through more efficient online surveillance of journalists, critics, etcetera,” said Jan Völkel, a University of Ottawa professor who monitors the Middle East and North Africa’s political transformation for the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation. “Modern technology will be used to control and suppress citizens, not to better include their voices in a political process. I don’t see any specific reason to hope for political improvements.”

Rights to freedom

The UAE has positioned itself as a global leader in humanitarianism, but that does not include rights to freedom and political participation, nor transparency or judicial independence. 

Technology has helped make the UAE state security services omnipresent, said the BTI report last year. They monitor media and public spaces for dissent, and punish it with arbitrary and unlimited detention. 

Yet the government’s modernisation programme had brought such material benefit to the people of UAE that it created a strong social consensus for its right to govern, and gave the ruling families a high degree of legitimacy. The UAE’s democratic, legal and social structure was feeble, but its economic transformation was phenomenal and its government administration exceptionally competent. 

The government of Abu Dhabi, where Stargate UAE is being built, said in a press release that its infrastructure would deliver “trusted … safe, secure and responsible AI that delivers long-term benefits for humanity”. 

G42 has announced recent deals to help other governments develop what it calls “responsible AI”, such as in Thailand, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Malaysia.

But the UAE was absent at negotiations that led to the world’s first treaty to govern AI systems with democratic, humanitarian and judicial principals last year. Gulf states were welcome to participate but none did so, a Council of Europe spokesperson said. The UK, US and Israel did, and signed it promptly. Ukraine signed it on the same day Trump presided over the Stargate UAE deal.

“I don’t see why it would be a game-changer,” said the CEO of a global political advisory, who asked not to be named. “OpenAI will be fine-tuned to meet the requirements of the local government. Any restriction to free speech that applies today would also apply to OpenAI.”

But they said they didn’t criticise the UAE because it is well run and safe, with good infrastructure. 

“If you are an old democracy like the UK, where you’ve been rich for a long time, you want freedom of speech. But this is not an issue in UAE,” they said. “I know the people, and it’s a fine place. But its goal is not to be a democracy. The goal is to be a place where citizens are richer and enjoy a good life. 

“Standards of living have massively improved since the seventies,” they added. “Some have been educated recently. It will happen, believe me. But at the moment, they’re still very much into being richer, going on holiday, spending more on stuff.”

Rafay Systems CEO Haseeb Budhani, who is working with Nvidia and Accenture to build AI systems in the region, said governments had to get the economy right first to improve the lives of citizens. 

“I spend a lot of time in Dubai,” he said. “Life is pretty good here. They’ve thought a lot about how to deliver excellent services, excellent experiences, great roads, great airports. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of time. And similarly in Saudi. That country is moving so fast, and AI has the potential to improve the lives of all the citizenry.”

Governments across the Middle East and Asia had been using open source AI models they could run locally because data sovereignty rules stopped them using OpenAI or Anthropic services served from outside the country. 

They were using Chinese AI models DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, as well as Meta’s Llama. Telcos, the region’s computing leaders, adopted open source AI to retain their dominance. They did not want to be dependent on OpenAI. 

Ernesto Martinez del Pino, a machine learning operations engineer working on AI development in UAE for global consultancy Intellias, said OpenAI was forced to invest in the region because it was losing business in lucrative sectors such as banking, where laws stopped data being transmitted to AI systems outside the country or even outside their own computing infrastructure. 

Most big organisations ran their systems on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which had infrastructure in UAE. But since OpenAI was backed by AWS rival Microsoft, they couldn’t get local access to OpenAI. 

OpenAI, G42 and the UAE governments of Abu Dhabi and Dubai were not prepared to comment.