AI in Parliament? United Arab Emirates Plans Automated Law Reform Process

The UAE is pioneering AI-driven legislation, using artificial intelligence to suggest legal changes and reshape how laws are created and reviewed.

The United Arab Emirates is planning to use artificial intelligence not just to speed up its lawmaking, but to help suggest changes to existing laws—a new move that experts say goes beyond what any other country is doing, as first reported by the Financial Times (FT).

“This new legislative system, powered by artificial intelligence, will change how we create laws, making the process faster and more precise,” said Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler and the UAE’s vice-president, as reported by the FT.

A new government office, the Regulatory Intelligence Office, will oversee this AI-driven lawmaking plan. The system is expected to track how laws affect the population and economy, drawing on a huge database of court rulings, public services, and both local and federal laws.

“The UAE appears to have an “underlying ambition to basically turn AI into some sort of co-legislator “, said Rony Medaglia, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, as reported by the FT.

The government hopes AI will make the legislative process up to 70% faster and reduce the costs of hiring law firms to review new regulations.

Vincent Straub, a researcher at Oxford University, noted that while the idea is innovative, it comes with risks. “They continue to hallucinate [and] have reliability issues and robustness issues […] We can’t trust them,” he warned, as reported by the FT.

AI models are prone to errors and can misunderstand human logic. The FT reports that Marina De Vos, a computer scientist at Bath University, explained that AI might suggest solutions that make sense to a machine but are completely impractical in real-world human society.

Despite these concerns, some experts believe the UAE’s top-down approach makes it easier for the country to push forward with such radical innovation. “They’re able to move fast. They can sort of experiment with things,” said Keegan McBride from the Oxford Internet Institute, as reported by the FT.

What remains unclear is which AI system the UAE will use—and how it will make sure human oversight is strong enough to avoid mistakes.