For years, governments have digitised their services by putting paper forms online. Abu Dhabi is now trying something deeper: rewriting the rules themselves so software can read them.
The emirate’s Department of Government Enablement (DGE) and OpenAI have launched Machine-Readable Government (MRG). The system turns a set of official regulations into a structured format that AI models can check applications against. When someone applies for a routine permit or certificate, the system compares the application with the relevant rules and returns a decision that cites the exact clause it relied on. The two partners say reviews that used to take days of manual work can now be finished in minutes, and that straightforward cases can be processed at any hour.
The first live deployment is at the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA), handling food import applications. It was built with Inception42, a unit of the Abu Dhabi AI group G42. Construction permits, business and freelance licensing, procurement, HR compliance and data access governance are next in line, but no timelines have been given.
The idea is not entirely new. Policy researchers and some governments have been exploring “rules as code” for years, mostly in limited pilots. What sets Abu Dhabi’s version apart is that it pairs the concept with large language models and is already handling real cases.
Human oversight is a central part of the design. Government staff set the standards, handle complex applications and remain responsible for every final decision. Both partners say MRG will not make autonomous decisions in high-stakes areas or on anything that affects a person’s rights, eligibility or access to essential services. The system also gives officials a single view of where regulations from different departments overlap or contradict each other, so a proposed policy can be tested against related rules before it takes effect.
Data handling was clearly a priority. The models run on GPUs in UAE data centres through OpenAI’s in-country processing setup, under local cybersecurity standards and Abu Dhabi law. The government owns all the data the system produces, and that data is not used to train AI models. The partners describe the UAE as the first Middle Eastern country to run OpenAI’s GPT models with in-country inference.
MRG is part of Abu Dhabi’s AED 13 billion digital strategy for 2025 to 2027, which aims to make it the world’s first AI-native government by 2027. The system is set to connect with TAMM, the emirate’s services app, which covers more than 1,200 services. The cost of the OpenAI agreements has not been disclosed, and there are no published figures yet on how many cases the food import pilot has handled. The rollout across more departments will be the real test of whether minutes-long approvals hold up beyond a single authority.