Abu Dhabi and OpenAI have jointly launched Machine-Readable Government (MRG), a framework that converts government policies and regulations into formats that AI systems can interpret and apply, with the aim of making Abu Dhabi the world’s first AI-native government by 2027.
The initiative, led by the Department of Government Enablement (DGE), targets routine regulatory assessments such as permit and certificate issuance. Under the system, a case is checked against applicable rules and a decision is generated with a direct link to the specific clause that produced it. Routine applications can be processed around the clock and returned in minutes rather than days.
High-stakes determinations affecting individual rights, eligibility or access to essential services are excluded from autonomous processing, and government officials retain oversight and accountability for all final decisions.
The first live pilot is already running with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, covering food import compliance, and was built in collaboration with Inception42, a G42 company.
The pilot validated a reusable Policy Adoption Engine that converts written policy into automated compliance checks. Planned expansions cover construction permitting, business and freelance licensing, data access governance, HR compliance and procurement.
“Making AI accessible for everyone requires transforming public sector delivery, helping it become faster, more responsive and more effective. By making certain laws machine-readable, while keeping people in control of decision-making, Abu Dhabi has set a new standard for AI-enabled public services. We’re proud to support Abu Dhabi’s AI vision, grounded in our shared commitment of responsible innovation,” Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI said in a statement.
“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,” Ahmed Tamim Hisham Al Kuttab, Chairman of DGE added.
AI processing runs on OpenAI’s UAE inference residency, meaning computation takes place on GPUs inside UAE data centres under a fail-closed security architecture governed by UAE cybersecurity standards. The Abu Dhabi government retains full ownership of all data generated through the system, which is not used to train AI models.
Structuring regulations into a single machine-readable format also gives policymakers a clearer picture of where rules across departments overlap or conflict, and allows officials to model the impact of proposed changes before they are enacted.
MRG forms part of Abu Dhabi’s AED 13 billion ($3.5 billion) Government Digital Strategy covering 2025 to 2027, and will integrate with TAMM, the emirate’s unified service app that consolidates more than 1,200 public and private services.
The framework is intended to serve as the underlying policy layer across 40 government entities, all of whose civil servants have been trained in AI.
