AI, culture and communication
Whose language, values and narratives are encoded in the AI systems used across the Arab world, and who answers for their effects.
Key messages
- Five states are coded as pursuing sovereign Arabic language-model programmes: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Tunisia.
- National ethics documents draw mainly on OECD, UNESCO, IEEE and EU texts; an ethics framework grounded in regional jurisprudential traditions is an open opportunity.
- Regulatory sandboxes concentrate on finance and health; AI systems that mediate public communication are largely outside current frameworks.
- Eight states have a formal risk classification scheme.
National ethics documents draw mainly on OECD, UNESCO, IEEE and EU texts, and the GCC AI Ethics Manual (2020) follows the same sources. An ethics framework grounded in regional jurisprudential traditions, such as maqāṣid al-sharīʿa, is an open opportunity for regional leadership.
Regulatory sandboxes concentrate on finance and health. Recommendation systems, conversational agents and content moderation fall largely outside existing frameworks, and eight states have a formal risk classification scheme, the basic instrument for extending oversight to these systems.
- Advanced (3)
- Intermediate (3)
- Emerging (3)
- Initial (4)
- Nascent (9)
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