The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is now the first country in the world to use artificial intelligence (AI) to write, review, and amend its laws.
According to UAE Vice President and Dubai Ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who made the announcement, AI will speed up lawmaking by up to 70 percent.
“This new legislative system, powered by artificial intelligence, will change how we create laws, making the process faster and more precise,” Sheikh Mohammed said.
He also revealed that a new government body, the Regulatory Intelligence Office, will oversee the implementation of the initiative.
Hesham Elrafei, a solicitor who helps write laws in the UAE, said the country is moving away from the slow, political process found in many democracies.
“This approach is faster, clearer, and based on solving real problems,” he told The Telegraph. He added that AI can help make laws easier to understand by writing them in plain language in both Arabic and English.
The AI lawmaking initiative is part of a broader digital strategy the UAE began years ago. In 2017, it appointed the world’s first Minister of Artificial Intelligence, Omar Sultan al-Olama, and launched a national AI strategy aimed at improving government efficiency.
Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political commentator, told The Telegraph that AI is a long-term initiative for the Arab states.
“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,” Abdulla said. “It 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.”
Not everyone is convinced that AI should write laws. Experts quoted in the Financial Times warned that AI tools can make mistakes, misread legal language, and generate proposals that don’t align with human judgment or local norms.
Vincent Straub, a researcher at Oxford University, said AI models are still prone to errors. “We can’t trust them … they continue to hallucinate [and] have reliability issues and robustness issues,” he said.
Others emphasized that AI should support, not replace, human decision-making. “Law is fundamentally a human endeavour,” said Ahmad al-Khalil, a lawyer in the UAE. “Human oversight remains crucial, especially when it comes to fairness and rights.”
