Across the Gulf, governments are racing to reinvent themselves as hyper-efficient “smart cities”, supported by a growing reliance on digital services, automation, and AI-driven public administration. More recently, the Emirati government declared that it aims to become the world’s first “AI-native” government by 2027, embedding machine learning systems into nearly every layer of governance. But behind this marketing lies an alarming reality: smart-city infrastructure is being repurposed for policing, surveillance, and social control.
The UAE provides a clear example of what an AI state looks like in practice. Cameras, biometric systems, and predictive analytics form an ambient surveillance network that residents cannot opt out of. AI systems now support a wide range of public administration functions, including law enforcement, prosecution, and parts of the judicial process. For example, under the UAE’s Oyoon Project, thousands of CCTV cameras across Dubai feed live video to a central command centre where machine-learning algorithms perform continuous facial recognition. This practice has resulted in hundreds of arrests for activities labeled as “suspicious”, but the automated analysis and underlying criteria driving these determinations remain opaque. As noted by Human Rights Watch, the extensive mass surveillance employed through an unregulated AI-driven framework constitutes a serious threat to privacy and freedom of expression.
The risks are most acute for marginalized communities such as migrant workers, who make up the majority of the UAE population. Predictive policing systems raise the risk that workers may be automatically flagged based on algorithmic profiles. In fact, surveillance technologies are embedded in a social ordering that ties security to race, migration status, and labour, reinforcing structural inequality by rendering certain populations institutionally suspect. For these communities, smart-city infrastructure constitutes a new layer of vulnerability and prosecution.
Despite the rapid expansion of AI-enabled policing, the UAE has not implemented any laws regulating the use of AI in criminal proceedings, creating significant due process concerns. Currently, AI systems operate with no independent audit mechanisms and with no procedure to challenge algorithmic errors. Data retention and use remains opaque, lacking any transparency obligations. The result of this legal vacuum is a civic redesign of urban environments, where surveillance becomes normalized and fundamental rights quietly erode.
The UAE’s smart city policing offers a small-scale preview of the ambitious model taking shape in Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, a smart city megaproject that places dense sensor networks at the core of its infrastructure. A 2025 report reveals that NEOM’s command and control center synthesizes inputs from cameras, sensors and biometric gates to algorithmically map behavior and detect what it labels as anomalies. In light of this, human rights groups warn that NEOM represents a blueprint for full-spectrum monitoring, embedding surveillance into the city and normalizing unprecedented data centralization.
The UAE’s current practices and Saudi Arabia’s NEOM vision illustrate a regional pattern of smart-city design in which digital services and urban policing converge to form a new Gulf governance model. The shift is therefore not merely a technological one, but a political one as well. Smart-city projects provide states with powerful tools for high-tech authoritarian governance, turning efficiency into enforcement.
As the Gulf accelerates toward its smart-city future, an urgent question to consider is whether there are sufficient safeguards and protections over how these technologies reshape the rights and autonomy of populations. DR4G condemns the unregulated expansion of AI-driven surveillance across the Gulf, where smart city technologies are deployed with no transparency or oversight. Additionally, DR4G calls for an immediate rights-based governance of AI systems, which includes clear legal limits on surveillance, independent auditing, and protections for the communities most vulnerable to technological harm. Without enforceable safeguards, the Gulf’s smart cities may become a permanent infrastructure of repression.