- The UAE will use AI to draft and review laws as part of a major digital overhaul.
- Leaders say AI will speed up lawmaking and cut political delays.
- However, experts warn AI still faces reliability and trust issues.
DUBAI, 25 April — The United Arab Emirates has announced plans to become the first country in the world to systematically use artificial intelligence for writing and reviewing laws.
This ambitious initiative will extend beyond federal and local legislation to include judicial rulings, executive procedures and public services as part of the Gulf nation’s broader digitalisation strategy, The Telegraph reported.
Last week, the UAE government established the Regulatory Intelligence Office, a new cabinet unit tasked with overseeing this technological transformation of the legislative process.
“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, the UAE’s Vice-President and ruler of Dubai.
The UAE’s commitment to artificial intelligence is not new. In 2017, it appointed Omar Sultan al-Olama as the world’s first AI minister shortly after launching the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence.
According to Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political commentator, “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.”
He noted that the country 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.”
Words reading “Artificial intelligence AI” are seen in this illustration taken December 14, 2023. — Reuters pic
The economic implications are substantial, with the UAE estimating that by 2030, AI will have a global market value of US$15.7 trillion (RM69 trillion), potentially boosting the country’s GDP by 35 per cent while reducing government costs by half.
Hesham Elrafei, a solicitor and UAE law drafter, explained that this initiative goes beyond merely 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,” Elrafei said.
According to Elrafei, AI technology can analyse court judgments, identify problems and suggest legislation to address gaps in the legal framework.
It can also study successful laws from around the world and help draft improved versions tailored to the UAE’s specific context.
This capability is particularly valuable in a country where only 10 per cent of the population is local, and clear legal communication across multiple languages is essential for a community comprising approximately 200 nationalities.
While Brazil has previously tested AI for drafting a single law, the UAE’s approach represents a more comprehensive transformation of the legislative process.
Elrafei described it as “a move away from outdated systems built on political compromise, towards one built on technology,” potentially redefining how modern governments create laws.
In contrast to many Western democracies, where lawmaking is influenced by political negotiations, the UAE is shifting towards a model based on “data, logic, and results.”
However, some experts have expressed concerns about this technological shift. Vincent Straub, a researcher at Oxford University, cautioned against complete reliance on AI systems, arguing that “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” implementing sweeping government digitalisation compared to many democratic nations due to its governance structure, commenting: “They’re able to move fast. They can sort of experiment with things.”
