ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates / RankWire.AI / – Abu Dhabi entities signed four agreements with OpenAI on Monday, bringing the company’s frontier AI to the emirate’s government, energy and investment sectors. Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, witnessed the signing. It followed his meeting with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. The two discussed opportunities to advance cooperation in artificial intelligence.
Their talks focused on using advanced AI to speed up government transformation and drive innovation in strategic sectors, in line with Abu Dhabi’s economic and development priorities. The emirate aims to strengthen its position as a global hub for AI innovation and deployment. It is also working towards becoming the world’s first fully AI-native government. Continued investment in digital infrastructure and national talent development supports that goal. The emirate’s digital strategy also aims to deploy more than 200 AI solutions across government services.
Altman said Abu Dhabi and the UAE are setting a bold global standard for integrating AI across the public and private sectors. He said OpenAI is proud to support the country’s ambition, built on a shared commitment to safety, accessibility and responsible innovation. The agreements were signed as Altman visited Abu Dhabi during ADIPEC, the UAE’s largest oil and gas event. The companies did not disclose financial terms.
AI-native government takes shape
The Abu Dhabi Government and OpenAI launched what they described as the world’s first AI-native Machine-Readable Government initiative. It converts selected policies and regulations into machine-readable form, allowing AI systems to help officials assess compliance for permits and certificates. Every assessment is traceable to the rule behind it. Government officials remain responsible and accountable for final decisions.
The Department of Government Enablement leads and governs the initiative. Its first pilot is already running with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority and covers food imports. AI processing uses OpenAI’s UAE inference residency, with computation on GPUs inside UAE data centers. The project supports Abu Dhabi’s AED13 billion digital strategy for 2025 to 2027, which targets a fully AI-native government by 2027.
Energy and investment deals signed
ADNOC, G42 subsidiary Inception42 and OpenAI signed an agreement making ADNOC the first energy company to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology. Running on GPT models through in-country inference in the UAE, the system will support operational, investment and commercial decisions. ADNOC aims to become the world’s most technology- and AI-enabled energy company. Mubadala and Inception42 also agreed with OpenAI to apply AI to investment analysis, opportunity identification and risk assessment.
In a fourth deal, Inception42 and OpenAI signed a five-year agreement to support frontier AI adoption across government, enterprise and education. The partners will build enterprise solutions for large UAE organizations. The agreements add to OpenAI’s presence in the UAE, where it is a partner in the Stargate UAE computing cluster in Abu Dhabi. G42 is building the cluster with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank. OpenAI has also expanded data center partnerships in India this year.