By Alexander Cornwell
DUBAI (Reuters) – President Joe Biden will host the United Arab Emirates president on Monday for a visit set to include White House talks on the Gulf state’s plans for artificial intelligence, an ambitious effort also drawing interest from U.S. geopolitical rival China.
The UAE, a wealthy oil producer and longtime security partner of the U.S., is hoping for greater access to American technology to build its own advanced tech industry.
G42, the state-backed technology company, has already secured a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft, partnered with chipmaker Nvidia and is using supercomputers built by Cerebras Systems.
But the U.S. has been concerned about the UAE’s warm relationship with China and placed restrictions on exports of some American technology to the UAE and other Middle Eastern states over concerns that it could be shared with Beijing.
Under pressure from the Biden administration, G42 this year began ripping out Chinese hardware it was using and sold off Chinese investment so it could work more closely with American firms. That preceded the $1.5 billion Microsoft investment.
“We cannot let this sort of wave of technological breakthroughs pass by us and not be somehow in partnership with it,” Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE’s president told journalists on Thursday ahead of the White House visit.
The White House has said Biden and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to discuss areas of deepening cooperation like advanced technology, artificial intelligence, investments and space exploration.
It will be the first time a UAE president visits the White House, although Sheikh Mohamed, as crown prince of Abu Dhabi, visited the White House in 2015 to meet President Barack Obama and in 2017 to meet President Donald Trump. Sheikh Mohamed met President Biden in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2022.
The UAE president is also due to meet Vice President Kamala Harris and leaders from the American business community.
AI AMBITIONS
The UAE is pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, which has included the development of Arabic and Hindi language chatbot applications similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Emirati officials believe the Gulf state’s bet on artificial intelligence will strengthen its international clout by making it a key economic actor long after demand for oil has dried up.
“We are in a position to be a pivotal country in this new information and technology age,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Sheikh Mohamed’s adviser on strategic research and advanced technology.
“We think we have the ingredients to build AI that can compete globally,” he told Reuters in a July interview.
Emirati officials also argue the UAE must have control over its own AI and develop its own, globally-competitive technology so that it could guarantee no outside actor could shut down the technology, harm its performance or alter its algorithms.
“The last thing we want to be in, is in the future as a nation, someone telling us well, you will get the latest version or you will not get the latest version,” Al Bannai said.
Although U.S. officials are wary of the UAE’s relationship with China, some believe artificial intelligence and fostering closer U.S.-UAE technology ties is one area where Washington could drive a wedge between Abu Dhabi and Beijing.
The UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Sultan Al Olama has acknowledged that there is a need for greater alignment and engagement between the UAE and the U.S.
CHINA SEEKS AI PARTNERSHIP WITH UAE
“There is the willingness for us to engage,” he said in a June interview, adding that Abu Dhabi was fully committed to being a long term strategic technology partner with Washington.
“We haven’t been shying away from our ambitions but we’re going to do it in the right way. We’re going to do it through partnership. We’re going to do it through transparency.”
China also sees the UAE as a long-term technology partner.
During a visit to Beijing in May by Sheikh Mohamed, Chinese President Xi Jinping called on the two countries to strengthen artificial intelligence cooperation.
Chinese AI companies SenseTime, sanctioned by the U.S. which has said it has links to China’s military industrial complex, and Terminus Group, both developers of facial recognition technology, are also working in the UAE.
Terminus Group’s Chief Scientist Ling Shao, who previously worked for G42, said there were many opportunities in the UAE.
But while the U.S. government may have reservations about the UAE’s pursuit of AI and ties with China, what is crucial for American industry is that the UAE has both the financial resources to fund expensive artificial intelligence research and a government committed to advancing its development.
“They’re among the leaders today and they’re on a path to be at the very top,” Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said in July.
(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell with additional reporting by Federico Maccioni; Writing by Alexander Cornwell and Andrew Mills, Editing by William Maclean)
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