The partners describe Abu Dhabi as the first government to optimize a defined set of its laws and policies for AI. They also call the launch a key milestone toward the emirate's goal of becoming the world's first AI-native government by 2027.
At least at the start, MRG leaves the law itself untouched. What changes is how existing rules are applied: written policy is made readable by AI, an individual case is tested against it, and the system returns a decision tied to the exact clause that shaped it.
The target is the paperwork behind licensing businesses, approving products and awarding contracts, all of which depend on complex laws, policies and procedures. Routine cases can be handled autonomously at any hour, the partners said, and answers that once needed days of manual review can come back in minutes, each one traceable to the rule that governs it.
Officials keep the final word. Government teams set the standards, review the complex cases and carry strict responsibility for every final decision, and they remain accountable for what the system decides.
Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, said: “Abu Dhabi and the UAE are setting a bold, global standard for AI integration across both the public and private sectors to make sure the benefits of AI reach everyone. We are proud to support the UAE’s ambition, anchored in a shared commitment to safety, accessibility and responsible innovation."
Ahmed Tamim Hisham Al Kuttab, Chairman of DGE, said: “When we set out to build the world’s first AI-native government, we knew that applying AI to old processes would only take us so far. The harder task was making policy itself intelligent, and that is what a Machine-Readable Government does. The rules that shape daily life, how a permit is approved, how a tender is decided, how a service reaches the public, will now be as capable as the systems we build to serve our people. It is the connective tissue between Abu Dhabi’s ambition and its delivery, and it puts us on a path no other government has yet taken.”
The benefits extend past individual applications. With policies held in one machine-readable structure, policymakers can see where rules from different departments overlap or contradict each other. Officials can also run a proposed change against related rules before it is enacted, which the government said helps simplify and strengthen regulation while keeping established legislation intact.
The ADAFSA pilot was built with Inception42, a G42 company. It validated what the partners call a reusable Policy Adoption Engine, a tool that turns narrative policy text into automated compliance checks and links every outcome back to the precise rule that produced it.
After this first rollout, Abu Dhabi intends to take MRG across its government entities. Next in line are construction permits, licensing for businesses and freelancers, HR compliance, procurement and the governance of data access, though no launch dates were given.
The computing behind MRG runs on OpenAI's UAE inference residency. Inference is the stage at which a trained model processes a request and produces an answer, and under this setup that real-time work happens only on GPUs inside UAE data centers. The system uses a fail-closed security architecture, follows UAE cybersecurity standards and is subject to Abu Dhabi law.
According to the release, that arrangement, which spans research done inside government departments as well as automated checks on commercial applications, puts the UAE ahead of every other Middle Eastern country in running OpenAI's GPT models on inference infrastructure located inside its borders. Last month, Emirates NBD said it would become the first bank in the Middle East and North Africa to run OpenAI's GPT models through in-country inference.
DGE and OpenAI jointly agreed the privacy and data-protection safeguards, which were built into MRG from the outset. The Abu Dhabi government keeps full ownership of all data the system creates. That data is not used to train AI models, and set rules cover how it is stored, used and deleted.
The initiative is a cornerstone of the $3.5 billion (AED 13 billion) Abu Dhabi Government Digital Strategy 2025-2027. When DGE announced that strategy, it said the plan was expected to add about $6.54 billion (AED 24 billion) or more to the emirate's GDP by 2027 and create more than 5,000 jobs, with goals including 100% adoption of sovereign cloud computing for government operations.
MRG will connect to TAMM, the emirate's unified services app, which now brings together more than 1,200 public and private services. That compares with the more than 800 government services offered by TAMM 3.0, which DGE introduced at GITEX 2024. The government said use cases are active across 40 government entities and that all Abu Dhabi Government civil servants have been trained in AI.
If the food-import pilot performs as described, businesses seeking permits and licenses could see shorter waits, while the clause-level record of each decision may make outcomes easier to check. Construction permits head the list of five areas named for the next phase, ahead of Abu Dhabi's 2027 deadline.
