Why the Middle East may Have an Early-Mover Advantage in Ethical AI

Ethical innovation in the Gulf is becoming a culture, not just a checklist.

Tasmia Ansari 11 hours ago

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In 2017, when the UAE announced the world’s first Minister of Artificial Intelligence, many around the globe viewed it as a novelty—just another futuristic gesture from a country that builds impossible skylines in the sand. But Omar Bin Sultan Al Olama offered something neither superficial nor utopian.

“AI is not negative or positive,” he said at the time. “It’s in between… it really depends on how we use it and how we implement it.”

His modest remark has since grown prophetic. Over the past seven years, the UAE has done more than just purchase AI capacity or announce moonshot strategies. It has attempted to establish a comprehensive cultural, regulatory, and infrastructural architecture for ethical AI.

Its neighbours continue to catch up. Qatar’s approach to ethical AI remains largely principled but early-stage, anchored in the National AI Strategy released by the Ministry of Transport and Communications. The document outlines values such as transparency, fairness, privacy, and human dignity; however, concrete enforcement tools and regulatory bodies are still in the process of maturation. Much of Qatar’s current work focuses on capacity building through institutions such as the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), which investigates algorithmic accountability, bias mitigation, and responsible data use. The country is signalling intent, but the architecture for day-to-day oversight continues to evolve.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is moving fast. The Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) has issued the National Principles for AI Ethics and launched governance tools, including the AI Ethics Framework and a model governance guide.

These outline responsible development, risk minimisation, and societal safeguards across public- and private-sector deployments. Yet, most of Saudi Arabia’s initiatives are in the rollout and adoption phase, not yet fully embedded in the country’s long-term regulatory culture.

Today, the region serves as both a laboratory for the most ambitious AI deployments and a crucible for rethinking what responsible technological progress looks like beyond the Western imagination.

If Silicon Valley’s motto is “move fast and break things,” the Gulf’s emerging counter-motto might be: “move fast, but build guardrails before the traffic arrives.”

A Blueprint, Born of Deep Pockets

Governments across the region recognized early on that AI would not be a discreet technological upgrade, but a structural transformation, akin to an operating system for the modern state. The region’s wealth enabled rapid investment in models, data infrastructure, and autonomous systems, but beneath the gleam of innovation lay an almost instinctive question: What happens when the machinery of governance becomes automated? What becomes of human judgment, cultural nuance, and moral discernment?

“The question is not ‘How can we use AI everywhere?’ but ‘How can we use AI well?’” says Zeenath Reza Khan, Associate Professor, Responsible IS, University of Wollongong in Dubai. Her words highlight an unsettling truth: ethical AI is not a technical problem but a cultural one.

The region, accustomed to transforming deserts into megacities and bureaucracies into digital portals, had the advantage of building from scratch. With no entrenched legacy systems, the region could lay down AI infrastructure and moral guidelines in tandem. The challenge was—and still is—to ensure that governance keeps pace with ambition.

“The state of AI ethics in the Gulf, especially within government technology, is rapidly maturing but still uneven,” says Saeed Aldhaheri, president of the UAE Robotics and Automation Society. He calls the region’s relationship between innovation and regulation asymmetrical.

The Minister, the University, and the Mandate

The appointment of an AI minister signaled an understanding that AI would require stewardship through policy, talent, institutions, and academic inquiry.

The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), launched in 2019 as the world’s first graduate-level university dedicated solely to AI, was part of this long game.

“The UAE recognized early on that AI is not only a technological advancement, but a societal shift,” Khan notes. “By establishing dedicated leadership at the ministerial level and investing in talent development through the world’s first university focused on AI, the country signaled that AI would be shaped thoughtfully, rather than left to develop by accident.”

In the Gulf, that is not an abstract commitment. Teacher development programs are successfully helping educators explain algorithmic bias to eleven-year-olds. Additionally, government procurement regulations require that machine-learning systems be thoroughly tested and verified before being implemented on a large scale. Furthermore, it’s common for clerics, coders, ethicists, and entrepreneurs to share the same platform at conferences.

“UAE’s early investment gave it credibility,” Khan adds. “When you are building, not merely observing, the world listens differently.” AI ethics frameworks are increasingly circulating in international policy circles—not because they are perfect, but because they are among the few being actively tested in real-world government systems.

Regulating On Paper

Countries adopted ethical AI principles as part of an expression of national identity and cultural continuity.

This does not mean the region has solved the issue of AI governance, far from it. As Aldhaheri notes: “Most guardrails remain high-level principles rather than enforceable regulations. Governments increasingly recognize that trust, safety, and international credibility depend on responsible deployment, but regulation is still catching up.”

Yet there are early signs of institutional muscle. The UAE’s “RegLab”—a regulatory laboratory launched in 2019—allows companies to test drones, autonomous vehicles, and other technologies in controlled environments while receiving temporary government licenses. It is, in spirit, a regulatory greenhouse: policy evolving in real-time around emerging tools.

Other frameworks provide structure, including the AI Adoption Guidelines for Government Services, the national AI charter, the Deepfake Guide, and the AI Maturity Self-Assessment Tool. These instruments are not shelfware. They appear in the tender documents of ministries, in training sessions for civil servants, and in the evaluation rubrics for digital transformation projects.

They signal a shift in the dialogue from “Is this innovative?” to “Is this responsible?”

According to Khan, these frameworks “set shared expectations for how AI should be built and used… not by slowing innovation but by ensuring that innovation is introduced with care, clarity and trust.”

What Keeps Regulators Awake

For all the optimism, the region remains acutely aware of the risks. Aldhaheri highlights the vulnerabilities that need urgent attention:

Autonomous system failures as AI agents become embedded in energy grids, healthcare diagnostics, transport systems, and smart-city operations.
Opaque decision-making algorithms are used in public services—immigration, welfare, and policing—where bias or error can go unchallenged without strong oversight.
Dependence on foreign AI models and infrastructure, even as the region builds its sovereign capabilities, leaves governments vulnerable to strategic risks.

Far from hypothetical, these are the very fault lines where human morality meets machine logic.

Khan adds another dimension: the cultural and linguistic mismatch embedded in global AI systems. Much of AI’s commercial backbone has been trained on English-dominant data, which often fails to capture the subtleties of Arabic dialects or Gulf social norms. “One of the most unique challenges is ensuring that AI systems genuinely understand and reflect the cultural and linguistic context of the people who use them,” she says. “Language is deeply tied to identity and meaning.”

Models such as Jais, Falcon, and the Oryx family represent an insistence on linguistic dignity. AI should not merely be translated. This, too, is a form of ethics.

Despite the region’s forward momentum, it recognizes that policies without enforcement remain aspirations. “Most efforts remain principle-level,” says Aldhaheri. “Implementation, auditing, and cross-agency standardization are still developing.”

A mature regulatory environment—one that mirrors the stringency of the EU AI Act or the UK’s sectoral guidelines—may still be several years away. But the building blocks are in place: civil servant training programs, sector-specific toolkits, and institutional risk assessment practices. What the region is attempting is unusual: to habituate an entire society to the idea that AI is not a technical product but an ecosystem.

Ethics as Muscle Memory

“To truly embed ethics into AI, we need to begin much earlier,” Khan insists. “Ethics cannot only appear at the point of deployment or regulation.” This sounds almost quaint in an age of automated efficiency, but her point is simple: ethical AI is literacy. It must be taught. Practiced. Debated.

In the UAE, this has already made its way into classrooms and boardrooms. Teachers receive training in digital citizenship; students learn to examine the influence of algorithms critically; policymakers are encouraged to measure progress not only by speed but also by its societal impact. The next frontier, according to Khan, is “normalization”—making ethical reflection part of everyday decision-making. “When people feel informed, included, and confident, they do not fear technology,” she says. “They participate in shaping it.”

Higher education, too, is transforming in response to this mandate. Ali Muzaffar, an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University Dubai, notes that AI enrollments in the UAE have grown by 20 to 40 percent annually, reflecting a surge of interest not only in technical skills but also in the social implications of automation.

“Universities are at the centre of this whole topic,” he says. “From teaching AI to future employees to creating AI ethics guidelines, universities play a pivotal role.”

However, their role is not simply to churn out engineers. It aims to cultivate thinkers who can examine AI as both a logical and ideological phenomenon.

Culture, Not Checklist

It is no coincidence that global tech companies are increasingly seeking partnerships in the Gulf—not only for capital, but also for regulatory test beds. The region’s centralized governance enables experimentation on a scale that most Western countries cannot attempt as quickly at present. With that comes responsibility—and scrutiny.

The Gulf’s journey with ethical AI is far from complete. The region is not immune to the temptations of unfettered automation, nor to the risks of state-driven AI overreach. However, here the debate between innovation and ethics is unfolding in real time—between ministries and universities, between technical labs and classrooms, and between regulators and the people they serve.

If the Gulf succeeds, it will not just be because it has drafted the most effective guidelines or built the most widespread data center. It will be because it managed to make regulation not an afterthought but a cultural habit of people and machines navigating a rapidly changing society.

“Ethical innovation becomes a culture, not a checklist,” Khan says.

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