Comparative evidence of how two Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states translate artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions into post-New Public Management (post-NPM) outcomes are scarce because most studies focus on Western democracies. To fill this gap, we examine constitutional, collective choice, and operational rules that shape AI uptake in two contrasting GCC members, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait, and whether they foster citizen centricity, collaborative governance, and public value creation. Anchored in Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework, the study integrates a most similar/ most different systems design with multiple sources: 62 public documents issued between 2018 and 2025, embedded UAE cases (Smart Dubai and MBZUAI), and 39 interviews with officials conducted from Aug 2024 to May 2025. Dual coding and process tracing connect rule configurations to AI performance. Our cross-case analysis identifies four mutually reinforcing mechanisms behind divergent trajectories. In the UAE, concentrated authority, credible sanctions, pro-innovation narratives, and flexible reinvestment rules transform pilots into hundreds of operating services and significant recycled savings. Kuwait's dispersed veto points, exhortative sanctions, cautious discourse, and lapsed AI budgets, by contrast, confine initiatives to pilot mode de - spite equivalent fiscal resources. These findings refine institutional theory by showing that vertical rule coherence, not wealth, determines AI's public value yield, and temper post-NPM optimism by revealing that efficiency metrics advance societal goals only when backed by enforceable safeguards. To curb ethics washing and test the transferability of these mechanisms beyond the GCC, future research should track rule diffusion over time, experiment with blended legitimacy-efficiency scorecards, and investigate how narrative framing shapes citizen consent for data sharing.

K2 Think compares well with reasoning models from OpenAI and DeepSeek but is smaller and more efficient, say researchers based in Abu Dhabi. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has released an open source model that performs advanced reasoning as well as the best offerings from both the United States and China--one of the strongest signs so far that the nation's big investments in artificial intelligence are starting to pay off. The new model, K2 Think, comes from researchers at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) located in UAE's capital Abu Dhabi. The model--one of the first so-called "sovereign" AI models that incorporates technical advances needed for reasoning--is being made available for free by G42, an Emirati tech conglomerate backed by Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth funds. G42 is running the model on a cluster of Cerberas chips, an alternative to Nvidia's hardware.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse cultural contexts, yet their internal biases remain poorly understood. In this work, we propose a novel framework to systematically evaluate how VLMs encode cultural differences and biases related to race, gender, and physical traits across countries. We introduce three retrieval-based tasks: (1) Race to Country retrieval, which examines the association between individuals from specific racial groups (East Asian, White, Middle Eastern, Latino, South Asian, and Black) and different countries; (2) Personal Traits to Country retrieval, where images are paired with trait-based prompts (e.g., Smart, Honest, Criminal, Violent) to investigate potential stereotypical associations; and (3) Physical Characteristics to Country retrieval, focusing on visual attributes like skinny, young, obese, and old to explore how physical appearances are culturally linked to nations. Our findings reveal persistent biases in VLMs, highlighting how visual representations may inadvertently reinforce societal stereotypes.

National security and military analyst Dr. Rebecca Grant joins'Fox & Friends First' to discuss President Donald Trump's historic business-focused trip to the Middle East and why a Trump-Putin meeting could be essential for peace in Ukraine. President Donald Trump secured 2 trillion worth of deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE during his trip to the Middle East last week in what some have argued is a move to counter China's influence in the region. While China has increasingly bolstered its commercial ties with top Middle Eastern nations who have remained steadfast in their refusal to pick sides amid growing geopolitical tension between Washington and Beijing, Trump may have taken steps to give the U.S. an edge over its chief competitor. But concern has mounted after Trump reversed a Biden-era policy – which banned the sale of AI-capable chips to the UAE and Saudi Arabia – that highly coveted U.S. technologies could potentially fall into the hands of Chinese companies, and in extension, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). U.S. President Donald Trump walks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman during a welcoming ceremony in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

A United Arab Emirates (UAE) academic lab today launched an artificial intelligence world model and agent, two large language models (LLMs) and a new research center in Silicon Valley as it ramps up its investment in the cutting-edge field. The UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) revealed an AI world model called PAN, which can be used to build physically realistic simulations for testing and honing the performance of AI agents. Eric Xing, President and Professor of MBZUAI and a leading AI researcher, revealed the models and lab at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California today. The UAE has made big investments in AI in recent years under the guidance of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the nation's tech-savvy national security advisor and younger brother of president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Xing says the UAE's new center in Sunnyvale, California, will help the nation tap into the world's most concentrated source of AI knowledge and talent.

President Donald Trump has hailed deepening ties between the United States and the United Arab Emirates and said that the latter will invest 1.4 trillion in the former's artificial intelligence sector over the next decade. "I have absolutely no doubt that the relationship will only get bigger and better," Trump said on Thursday at a meeting with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, on the final leg of his three-country tour of the Gulf region that saw him strike a series of lucrative tech, business and military deals that he said amounted to 10 trillion. Sheikh Mohammed said the UAE remained "committed to working with the United States to advance peace and stability in our region and globally". The deal with UAE is expected to enable the Gulf country to build data centres vital to developing artificial intelligence models. The countries did not say which AI chips could be included in UAE data centres.

Donald Trump's jaunt to the Middle East featured an entourage of billionaire tech bros, a fighter-jet escort, and business deals designed to reshape the global landscape of artificial intelligence. On the final stop of the tour in Abu Dhabi, the US President announced that unnamed US companies would partner with the United Arab Emirates to create the largest AI datacenter cluster outside of America. Trump said that the US companies will help G42, an Emirati company, build five gigawatts of AI computing capacity in the UAE. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who leads the UAE's Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council, and is in charge of a 1.5 trillion fortune aimed at building AI capabilities, said the move will strengthen the UAE's position "as a hub for cutting-edge research and sustainable development, delivering transformative benefits for humanity." A few days earlier, as Trump arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia announced Humain, an AI investment firm owned by the kingdom's Public Investment Fund.

A swath of US technology firms announced deals in the Middle East as Donald Trump trumpeted 600bn in commitments from Saudi Arabia to American artificial intelligence companies during a tour of Gulf states. Among the biggest deals was a set signed by Nvidia. The company will sell hundreds of thousands of AI chips in Saudi Arabia, with a first tranche of 18,000 of its newest "Blackwell" chips going to Humain, Saudi Arabia's sovereign-wealth-fund-owned AI startup, Reuters reported. Cisco on Tuesday said it had signed a deal with G42, the AI firm based in the United Arab Emirates, to help the company develop that country's AI sector. Trump plans to visit the UAE on Thursday.

On May 4, Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) launched a barrage of suicide drones at Port Sudan, the army's de facto wartime capital on the Red Sea. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) accused foreign actors of supporting the RSF's attacks and even threatened to sever ties with one of its biggest trading partners. The RSF surprised many with the strikes. It had used drones before, but never hit targets as far away as Port Sudan, which used to be a haven, until last week. "The strikes … led to a huge displacement from the city. Many people left Port Sudan," Aza Aera, a local relief worker, told Al Jazeera.

United States President Donald Trump will undertake a three-day tour of the Gulf for his first state visit since retaking office in January. The trip begins in Saudi Arabia, followed by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It marks Trump's second foreign visit as president after he attended Pope Francis's funeral in Rome in April. Trump will fly out of the US on Monday and start his trip in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Tuesday. He is expected to attend a Gulf summit in the city on Wednesday, visit Qatar later that day and conclude his visit in the UAE on Thursday.