UAE's AI Strategy and the Question of Digital Sovereignty
The Emirates has moved faster than almost any comparable nation on artificial intelligence. But speed raises its own questions about who ultimately controls the infrastructure of the future.
In 2017, when the UAE appointed the world's first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, sceptics were plentiful. The announcement felt more like branding than policy — a signal of modernity for a country that had built its reputation on ambitious gestures.
Omar Al Olama, the minister appointed to that role, has spent the years since proving the sceptics wrong in ways that are worth examining carefully.
The Strategy in Practice
The UAE's AI strategy has evolved through several distinct phases. The initial phase — roughly 2017 to 2020 — focused primarily on government service delivery: using AI to automate bureaucratic processes, improve public services, and reduce the cost of government operations. On those terms, the results have been meaningful.
The second phase, which accelerated after 2021, was more ambitious. It involved direct investment in AI research and development, the cultivation of domestic talent, and — most consequentially — the development of sovereign AI capabilities in the form of large language models trained on Arabic-language data.
Falcon, developed by the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, was not merely a technological achievement. It was a statement of intent: that the UAE intended to be a producer of frontier AI, not merely a consumer of it.
Dr. Faris Nasser is a Technology Policy Fellow at Imprint.
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