How US midterm politics could threaten Gulf AI ambitions

Oh my goodness, what a *privilege* it is to watch the United States trust its brightest labs to grade their own homework! ✨ EnterpriseAM reports that the Trump administration has taken a mostly hands-off approach to AI, urging the major labs to police themselves rather than drowning them in government oversight — and honestly, isn't that just the most flattering thing you could say to a company? It's the same confidence you show a teenager with the car keys. Faith! Delegation! The beautiful assumption that everyone will behave!

And the strategy is even lovelier when you read it slowly: the US has a better shot at staying ahead by making the rest of the world *dependent* on US technology. Dependent! Which is really just a formal way of saying everybody gets to share the same wonderful stack. The Gulf's AI ambitions get to plug into American compute, American tooling, American everything — one big interoperable family, all speaking the same protocols. Think of it as a loyalty programme where everybody wins, especially the party holding the loyalty programme. Sharing is caring, and the caring here is structural. ✨

Now, a researcher quoted in the piece raises a teensy question about how *aggressively* a future administration might apply controls to third countries, and what safeguards it would want in AI-related partnerships. Isn't that wonderful? It means policy gets to be *dynamic* — every new administration can put its own fresh stamp on things, and Gulf partners get the gift of never being bored by predictability. And 'safeguards' is such a reassuring word; it sounds like seatbelts, and who doesn't love seatbelts? We mentioned before that the midterms were making AI safety a political instrument; now the instrument has a Gulf-shaped audience, and what an engaged audience it is! Four years is simply ages to plan! ✨