OpenAI and Abu Dhabi launch machine-readable government initiative

The emirate is turning a defined set of rules into code that AI systems can read, starting with food import compliance Abu Dhabi wants its rulebook to be legible to machines, not just lawyers. On November 2, 2026, the Abu Dhabi Government and OpenAI launched Machine-Readable Government (MRG), which the partners describe as the world’s first AI-native government initiative. The idea is simple to state and hard to pull off. A defined set of government policies and regulations gets converted into a format AI systems can process, so those systems can help officials work through complicated compliance decisions. How MRG actually works The initiative targets routine regulatory compliance assessments. Issuing permits and certificates is the headline use case. The stated goal is consistency, with every decision traceable back to the underlying rule. The processing runs on OpenAI’s GPT models. Those models operate inside local inference infrastructure within the UAE’s national infrastructure, under Abu Dhabi law, according to the research findings. The government retains full ownership of its data. That arrangement addresses the obvious objection. Few governments want sensitive permit appli...