UAE first country set to use AI to write laws
The United Arab Emirates will be the first country to use artificial intelligence to write and review laws.
As part of a wider shift to digitise the Gulf country, its ruler announced federal and local laws will be written by computers, along with judicial rulings, executive procedures and public services.
A new cabinet unit named the Regulatory Intelligence Office was approved last week to oversee the move, which will streamline the legislative process, the UAE vice president said.
'This new legislative system, powered by artificial intelligence, will change how we create laws, making the process faster and more precise,' said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who is also the ruler of Dubai.
Emirati political commentator Abdulkhaleq Abdulla told The Telegraph that AI is a long-term project for the Arab states.
'The UAE is very serious about AI. It wants to be a global AI and digital economy hub just as it is a global financial and logistics hub.
'It is investing massively in digital infrastructure to stay ahead of the crowd in the next 50 years, just as it invested generously in its physical infrastructure over the past 50 years,' said Mr Abdulla.
In 2017, the UAE appointed the world's first AI minister, Omar Bin Sultan Al Olama, days after the launch of the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, a big part of the UAE's decades-long objectives, aiming to improve government performance.
The Gulf state estimates that by 2030, AI will have a global market value of $15.7 trillion (£11.8 trillion) boosting the UAE's GDP by 35 per cent and reducing government costs by 50 per cent.
Hesham Elrafei, a solicitor and UAE law drafter, told The Telegraph that the UAE is doing more than just using AI to write laws.
'It's introducing a new way of making them. Instead of the traditional parliamentary model – where laws get stuck in endless political debates and take years to pass – this approach is faster, clearer, and based on solving real problems,' he said.
'AI can analyse court judgements, spot problems, and suggest laws that fill the gaps. It can also study the best laws from around the world and help draft better versions suited to the UAE.'
For a country where only 10 per cent of the population is local, making laws clear to the nation comprising around 200 nationalities, is important, he said.
'This also means writing laws in clear, plain language, in both Arabic , English and other languages, so people can understand them. That's essential in a country where so many residents aren't native Arabic speakers.
'In contrast, in many Western democracies, laws are often so complex that ordinary people can't understand them without hiring a lawyer. That creates distance between people and the law. The UAE is closing that gap.'
He said it is a move which could redefine how modern governments create laws. 'In many democracies, lawmaking is about compromise and politics. Here, we're seeing a shift to data, logic, and results,' he said.
'Brazil tested AI to draft a law, and it worked. But the UAE is going further, turning lawmaking into a fast, practical, and people-focused process. It's a move away from outdated systems built on political compromise, towards one built on technology.'
However, in the Financial Times, experts warned of the possible pitfalls. Vincent Straub, a researcher at Oxford university said: 'We can't trust them … they continue to hallucinate [and] have reliability issues and robustness issues.'
Keegan McBride, a lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the UAE has had an 'easier time' embracing sweeping government digitalisation than many democratic nations have. 'They're able to move fast. They can sort of experiment with things,' he told the FT. 'In terms of ambition, [the UAE are] right there near the top.'
A safety net must be in place to safeguard the system, warned Marina De Vos, a computer scientist at Bath university. The AI could propose something 'really, really weird' that 'makes sense to a machine', she told the FT, but 'may absolutely make no sense to really implement it out there for real in a human society'.
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Voices from the Arab press: Trump's first 100 days in office
A weekly selection of opinions and analyses from the Arab media around the world. Asharq al-Awsat, London, May 25 For more stories from The Media Line go to In late April and early May, I was visiting the US. It was the 100th day since Donald Trump's inauguration as president of the US. Traditionally a symbolic milestone, this occasion carried far more weight than usual – for the president himself, his supporters, his critics, the American media, and much of the world. The reason was simple: the sheer volume of executive orders Trump had signed, the sweeping ambitions he laid out, and the grandiose language he employed to do so. 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