UAE spymaster who wants to ‘eliminate all threats’ seeks an iron grip on AI’s future

A Guardian investigation has revealed how Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and the man at the top of a security apparatus that has spent years hacking, tracking and jailing critics of the ruling family, has become one of the most powerful financiers of artificial intelligence in the world.

The long read by journalist Jack Shenker, published yesterday, warns that Tahnoon’s rise places critical parts of the world’s AI infrastructure in the hands of a man who commands the full surveillance machinery of an authoritarian state. 

Tahnoon, the brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, oversees an economic empire estimated at around $1.5 trillion. As people increasingly hand their data, and even their private thoughts, to AI systems, the paper argues that the character of those who control the technology matters.

At the centre of Tahnoon’s ambitions is G42, the company he built in the late 2010s from the remains of DarkMatter, the state-linked firm that ran the UAE’s secret hacking programme, Project Raven. Staffed largely by former US intelligence operatives, the programme began as a counterterrorism effort but grew into a sweeping hacking operation against Emirati dissidents, human rights activists, journalists and politicians around the world. 

G42 expanded after Tahnoon became national security adviser in 2016, and the UAE’s normalisation of relations with Israel, which he helped steer, opened the door to the Pegasus spyware. In July 2021, Pegasus became the centre of an international scandal over its use to target journalists, human rights activists and political figures worldwide. 

The Guardian reports that G42 drew on personnel from the UAE’s cyber-espionage operation. Its CEO, Peng Xiao, previously ran a key DarkMatter unit, while DarkMatter’s former boss, Karim Sabbagh, now heads one of G42’s main subsidiaries. 

One of the company’s first products, the messaging app ToTok, was exposed by the New York Times as spyware designed to track users’ conversations, movements and contacts. G42 now markets predictive tools to governments that promise to profile suspects, map relationships and analyse behaviour.

The Guardian investigation highlighted the case of Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor to illustrate how surveillance technology has been used against critics. An engineer and poet who signed a 2011 petition calling for an elected parliament, Mansoor faced persistent targeting by the security services. After he opened a malicious email attachment, his private data was sent to a server registered to an Abu Dhabi PO box used by Tahnoon’s personal office. 

Hackers also turned Mansoor’s baby monitor into a recording device. He was sentenced to ten years in prison after a secret trial in 2017 and has been held in solitary confinement in Al-Sadr prison, about ten miles from G42’s AI mega-campus, ever since.

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British academic Matthew Hedges, who was jailed for life on spying charges in 2018 before receiving a royal pardon, told the paper he was held in solitary confinement and interrogated for up to 15 hours a day. Asked who bore ultimate responsibility, he traced the chain of command to Tahnoon. The UAE has denied that Hedges was tortured or mistreated.

The UAE is already using AI to silence its critics. The paper notes that Abu Dhabi, which is accused of complicity in genocide in Sudan, has deployed AI tools in a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the United Nations. Ronald Deibert, director of The Citizen Lab, told the paper that the decline of democracy over the past 20 years has coincided with a vast expansion of digital surveillance, with the UAE at its epicentre and every road there leading to Tahnoon.

The investigation raises questions about how Tahnoon’s security record could shape his growing influence over AI but does not establish that G42’s AI infrastructure is being used to hack or intimidate critics.

Tahnoon has never given a substantive interview, and those who work closely with him are usually made to sign non-disclosure agreements. The investigation portrays a man obsessed with winning: he hired one of the developers of the video game Age of Empires to coach him so he could beat his brothers, and personally funded Hydra, a chess supercomputer that defeated several grandmasters. He reportedly aims to live to 150.

Emirati sociologist Mira Al Hussein of the University of Edinburgh said she was deeply worried by his view of the world. “He’s the video-game prince who wants to press a button and eliminate all threats,” she said.

Western tech giants and the Trump administration have embraced him regardless. Microsoft has invested $1.5 billion in G42, and G42 and its AI investment fund, which Tahnoon chairs, are investors in or major partners of OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. 

Donald Trump reversed Biden-era restrictions and authorised the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips to the UAE, many of them destined for G42. The deal came two weeks after one of Tahnoon’s investment vehicles bought $2 billion of cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty, a Trump family company in which Tahnoon also holds a 49 per cent stake. 

The White House and World Liberty deny any connection between the investments and the chip deal, while Senator Elizabeth Warren has described the arrangement as corruption.

G42 told the Guardian it was founded as an AI and technology company focused on cloud and AI infrastructure and denied that its origins lay in cyber-espionage or that it conducts or enables unlawful surveillance. Tahnoon did not respond to an interview request, and the UAE foreign ministry declined to comment.

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