It becomes a big challenge to deal with when one has two close friends, but these close friends are not exactly friendly in their behavior towards each other. This is what the United Arab Emirates (UAE) seems to be facing today, with a friend like China on the one hand and the United States on the other.
The UAE’s “The National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031” to make the country a global hub of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now under increasing American scrutiny because of the country’s strong technological collaborations with Chinese scientists and institutions.
That is because of China’s “reputation” as a leading practitioner of “Intellectual Property Theft.”
Given the finiteness of its oil power, the UAE is systematically pursuing its larger goal of transitioning to a knowledge-based economy, and AI has a huge role to play in this. It aims to develop a digital technology ecosystem by commercializing and deploying AI in priority sectors.
Abu Dhabi’s foreign policy is said to be “neutral” in the sense that it wants to work with “everyone.” The country has sufficient capital, but it lacks talent and technology to transform high-tech.
To fill this gap, it has invited huge technological and academic collaborations from all the leading countries, including the U.S. and China. However, the Americans’ suspicion of China is making it very difficult for the institutions promoting AI in the UAE, particularly for those that are simultaneously collaborating with the Americans.
It may be noted that the U.S. grounded last year the UAE’s plans to participate in China’s 2026 Chang’e-7 moon mission, citing US technology transfer restrictions.
Similarly, there are now reports that Microsoft has decided to scale back its $1.5 billion partnership with the Abu Dhabi artificial intelligence (AI) firm Group 42 (G42) for its connections with China.
In April this year, Microsoft Corp. announced a $1.5 billion investment in Group 42 (G42), the leading UAE-based artificial intelligence (AI) technology holding company.
The investment was said to strengthen the two companies’ collaboration on bringing the latest Microsoft AI technologies and skilling initiatives to the UAE and other countries around the world. G42 and Microsoft, it was declared, would work together to provide nations with equitable access to services to address important governmental and business concerns while ensuring the highest standards of security and privacy.
But, according to a report on August 1 in the “Politico” news portal, Microsoft has now decided to scale back its $1.5 billion partnership with G42), presumably because the US Government’s House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party recently called out G42 for its connections with China.
The Congress feared that G42’s ties to China would mean that the deal could allow Beijing to siphon off cutting-edge tech from the U.S.
Under the reported new plan, Microsoft will instead lease its AI products to G42, an arrangement that will allow it to exert more oversight over any hardware and software it transfers to the UAE.
Latest reports suggest that universities in the UAE are also now under scanner by the U.S. for their links with China. Cheryl Yu, a Fellow in China Studies at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, points out how the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) of the UAE, which has important collaborations with leading US technology companies and universities, poses a high risk of technology transfer due to its deep connections with China.
Apparently, MBZUAI has many researchers from China, and it is feared that they have access to chips that are currently under US export controls to China, such as NVIDIA A100 GPUs.
Incidentally, MBZUAI is the first university in Abu Dhabi focused on graduate-level AI research. According to its website, it was established to support the UAE’s National Strategy for AI. The university aims to attract top global talent, provide full scholarships to admitted students, and foster an environment conducive to innovation.
Though mostly funded by the UAE government, MBZUAI, it is said, has been supported by some Chinese entities, and PRC firms such as Huawei have supported researchers and projects.
Yu has written that MBZUAI is linked with organizations and individuals with strong ties to the Chinese government. The university was incubated by Shao Ling, its first Executive Vice President and Provost, and his UAE-based national research organization, the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (now part of G42).
Eric Xing is now Chief Scientist and President of Terminus International, an AI smart service provider, and also runs an AI start-up, Petuum. Investors in the latter include Advantech Capital, whose founder, Yu Jianming, is close to former PRC Premier Wen Jiabao’s family.
In addition, Shao attended a 2012 event hosted by the Guangdong Bureau of Foreign Experts Affairs, a local-level branch of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (SAFEA), an organization involved in technology transfer.
Besides, Yu highlights how MBZUAI’s president, founding members, trustees, and board members have connections to united front organizations involved with technology transfer or have received awards from PRC government entities.
For instance, MBZUAI’s current president, Eric Xing, was appointed as a “Zhongguancun Overseas Strategic Scientist” in March 2017 at the Beijing-Silicon Valley High-end Talent Summit by the head of Beijing Talent Work Leading Group.
One of MBZUAI’s founding board members, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao), current head of CollegeAI at Tsinghua University, also has links to the PRC government. In 2005, Beijing presented him with the Chinese Government Friendship Award.
Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, is also an MBZUAI trustee. Lee has been recognized as one of the “40 Chinese Returned Overseas Students in 40 Years of Reform and Opening-up” by United Front-affiliated organizations, which are central to illicit technology transfer efforts in China.
Beyond the people involved with the university, MBZUAI has also built relationships and collaborated with PRC companies and institutions. In March 2023, it signed a five-year research and development cooperation agreement with Beijing Infinite Brain Technology (IBT) Company to establish a joint research laboratory that develops digital therapeutic products for human brain health by advancing and optimizing AI technology. IBT, incidentally, was co-founded by Xue Gui, a Changjiang Scholar chair professor in the National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University (BNU).
MBZUAI also works with Chinese tech giants with strong government links. For example, Huawei has supported individuals affiliated with MBZUAI and provided them with GPU computing services for research.
Obviously, the U.S. authorities do not consider all these connections with China to be friendly when MBZUAI also has close ties with leading American AI organizations.
After all, MBZUAI has a Memorandum of Understanding with IBM to establish an AI Center of Excellence. Under this MoU, IBM has provided training and technology, including IBM tools, software, courseware, and cloud accounts, to support the university’s aim of becoming a global leader in AI research and applications.
The university also worked with IBM to apply the company’s geospatial foundation model to understand the urban environment in Abu Dhabi. Besides, MBZUAI is also a member of the AI Alliance, a group launched by IBM and Meta in December 2023.
Significantly, in January this year, MBZUAI’s research project, “Concept-centric Representation, Learning, Reasoning, and Interaction,” received a $4 million grant from the US Department of Defense and intelligence community for AI collaboration in defense.
Other university partners in this project include Meta, Amazon, the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, the Center for the Theoretical Foundations of Learning, Inference, Information, Intelligence, Mathematics and Microeconomics at UC Berkeley (CLIMB), Cerebras System, CMU, Stanford, and New York University.
It is no wonder that MBZUAI’s involvement with Chinese entities in such close proximity to leading US technology companies and universities has attracted the attention of American authorities. This is all the more so when there are many reports that show how China has sponsored thousands of scientists and engineers to study abroad, particularly in the U.S., in order to acquire technology and technological know-how to modernize its military.
Even Australians have complained China’s relentless pursuit of technological dominance has manifested in their country “in a multifaceted campaign of intellectual property theft, cyber espionage, and talent recruitment.” Australia’s universities, with their extensive international partnerships and research collaborations, are said to be particularly vulnerable to this threat.
The same is true for Canada, too. The federal government has released a list of “sensitive” research areas, including advanced weapons, quantum technologies, robotics, aerospace, space and satellite technology, and medical and healthcare technology.
Researchers seeking federal grants to study in any of those fields will need to attest that they aren’t working with or receiving money from any of the foreign organizations and institutions cited by Ottawa as threats to national security. There are 100 such foreign organizations and institutions from Russia, Iran, and China.
In view of this environment, what should the UAE do? This is a very difficult question to answer, other than to say that Abu Dhabi has to perform a very challenging diplomatic balancing act to achieve its global AI ambitions.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board – EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, on strategic affairs for nearly three decades. A former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship, he is also a Professor at Reva University, Bangalore.
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