United Arab Emirates Joins U.S. and China in Giving Away A.I. Technology

In a move that shows the growing influence of the United Arab Emirates in the global artificial intelligence race, a new research lab backed by the Persian Gulf nation said on Tuesday that it was freely sharing an A.I. model meant to compete with systems released by companies in the United States and China.

Over the past year, many Chinese companies have aggressively shared their technologies through a process called open source, hoping to undercut leading U.S. companies like OpenAI and Google. Last month, OpenAI freely shared two of its own models in an effort to level the playing field and ensure that the world’s software developers and businesses continued to use its technology.

Now the new Emirati lab, the Institute of Foundation Models, has released its first open source model, K2 Think. The lab said the system performed on a par with the leading open source technologies from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek, according to standard benchmarks.

The Emirates is among several nations pouring billions of dollars into computer data centers and research to compete with leading nations like the United States and China in artificial intelligence. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Singapore are embracing the idea that the A.I. is so important, each should have its own version of the technology.

“A.I. will not be monopolized by just a few countries,” said Eric Xing, president of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, which operates the Emirates’ new lab. “We are trying to build a foundation for research and development and sovereignty of intellectual creativity in this country.”

The new open source release from the Emirates is likely to divide opinion in Washington. The lab built its technology using data centers operated by G42, an Emirati firm that recently received more than 10,000 computer chips from the United States as part of a deal between the Trump administration and the Emirates.