Altman signs four Abu Dhabi deals, from permits to Mubadala investments

Abu Dhabi is using OpenAI’s models to help officials check permit and certificate applications against its rules. The pilot turns a set of government policies and regulations into a form that AI systems can read. It is already running on food imports.

It is one of four OpenAI Abu Dhabi deals signed on Monday, the Abu Dhabi Media Office said. Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed watched the signings after he met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.

“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,” Altman said in a statement.

AI in government

The Abu Dhabi Government calls the project the Machine-Readable Government initiative. It wants to become the world’s first “AI-native” government, according to the statement.

The AI systems assist officials with routine compliance checks, including those for permits and certificates. Each assessment can be traced back to the rule behind it. Officials keep oversight and make the final decisions, the statement said.

The Department of Government Enablement leads the project. Its first pilot runs with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority. The computing runs on GPUs in data centres inside the UAE, through OpenAI’s local inference service.

Investment and a five-year deal

Mubadala, the emirate’s sovereign investor, signed a deal with OpenAI and Inception42, a subsidiary of G42. They will use AI for investment analysis, to find opportunities and to assess risk.

Inception42 and OpenAI also signed a five-year agreement to bring OpenAI’s models to government, businesses and schools in the UAE. Together they will build AI products for large UAE organisations.

The fourth deal makes state oil company ADNOC the first energy company to use OpenAI’s Frontier platform, as we reported this morning. G42 is also building OpenAI’s Stargate data centre in the UAE.

Altman at Adipec

Altman also spoke on Monday at Adipec, the oil and gas conference in Abu Dhabi, Bloomberg reported.

AI “is going to transform the economics of the energy world,” Altman said.

“For a long time, the AI industry has talked about what it needs from the energy industry. And now I think we can repay the favor,” he added.

The world is going to need much more energy, he said. Altman also said AI now feels less like a new industrial revolution and “much more like a new Renaissance”.

The money behind it

Abu Dhabi investors have backed both OpenAI and Anthropic. MGX co-led Anthropic’s $30bn raise in February and OpenAI’s $122bn raise in March, Kai Nicol-Schwarz reported for CNBC.

OpenAI is now raising up to $20bn in a new funding round, which investors from the UAE co-lead, CNBC reported.