Abu Dhabi has put an OpenAI system for applying government rules into production for food-import cases, aiming to speed routine reviews while leaving officials accountable for final decisions.
Abu Dhabi Government and OpenAI launched Machine-Readable Government (MRG) on Nov. 2. Led by the Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi (DGE), the initiative converts selected policies and regulations into formats AI systems can use to assist with permit and certificate applications. Its first production pilot is with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA) and focuses on food imports.
The government says some routine food-import applications can now move through the process in minutes, compared with days for the previous manual process. Separately, The National reported Nov. 6 that Faisal Al Hawi, director of DGE’s AI Factory, said certain complex cases take minutes under the system; previously, they could take several days or close to a week.
The Abu Dhabi Media Office says assessments can be traced to the rule they apply, while officials retain oversight and accountability for final decisions. The launch announcement says model computing runs on GPUs in UAE data centers. It also says the work is governed by Abu Dhabi law, the government retains ownership of its data, and data generated through MRG will not be used to train AI models.
The Abu Dhabi Media Office said Abu Dhabi’s Nov. 2 agreements with OpenAI covered government, energy and investment; MRG advances the government portion of that package. DGE’s AED 13 billion Digital Strategy for 2025-2027 aims to make the emirate the world’s first fully AI-native government by 2027. The strategy also targets 100% sovereign-cloud adoption and digitization and automation of all processes.
The launch release names construction permits, business and freelance licensing, data-access governance, human-resources compliance and procurement as possible areas for expansion. It gives no rollout schedule for those applications.
