EXPERT INTERVIEWS – When the White House announced multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence deals with the UAE and Saudi Arabia earlier this month, there were several reactions: surprise at the sheer scale of the deals; positive responses from the American AI sector, noting the investment and compute power the U.S. stood to gain; and – on the negative side – security concerns over the sharing of so much AI data and technology in another part of the world, and specifically the risk that China might gain so-called “backdoor” access to advanced AI chips and data.
The issue has pit tech industry leaders against national security and China hawks in both parties, who worry about that “backdoor” leak from the Gulf states to China. In the longer term, another worry is that U.S. companies might build the data centers that power AI development in the Gulf rather than in the U.S.
During his three-day trip to the Middle East, President Trump secured deals to supply advanced U.S. chips to the two Gulf nations and build massive data centers in the region. One agreement with the UAE involves the building of the largest artificial intelligence campus outside the United States; another would give the Gulf country expanded access to advanced AI chips.
The White House touted the deals as a bid to expand U.S. influence in the AI sector and boost the U.S. tech sector generally. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard W. Lutnick said the UAE agreement “launches an historic middle eastern partnership on AI,” and “a major milestone in achieving President Trump’s vision for U.S. AI dominance.”
As for the security issues, the White House said the UAE had committed to “stringent measures to prevent diversion and ensure controlled access to technology.”
Some experts – and Democratic lawmakers – weren’t convinced.
Last week a group of Senate Democrats wrote to Commerce Secretary Lutnick and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, urging the Trump administration to allow more scrutiny of the AI deals. The senators said the agreements “amount to a breathtaking rollback of export control restrictions that have helped maintain the U.S. technological edge to ensure the United States wins the AI race.” The senators called for guardrails on sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to prevent sensitive technology leaking to China and Russia.
Some Republicans joined the chorus of concern. “The U.S. must lead the world in AI technology—but we must do it securely,” Rep. John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, said in a post on X. “The CCP is actively seeking indirect access to our top tech. Deals like this require scrutiny and verifiable guardrails.”
The Cipher Brief discussed the deals with two experts in AI and security – Janet Egan, a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and Georgia Adamson, a Research Associate at the CSIS Wadhwani AI Center. They spoke with Cipher Brief reporter Alison Spann. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
THE CONTEXT
- The Trump Administration announced a major new joint AI initiative with the UAE, an upgrade to an existing “U.S.-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership” that will bring American-made A.I. chips to an Abu Dhabi campus and constitute the largest such project outside of the United States. The administration said the project will help American AI companies serve customers in Africa, Europe and Asia. Shipments of AI chips will begin this year.
- The White House has said the agreement further aligns the global AI ecosystem to U.S. values, extending the “American tech stack” to a strategic Middle East partner.
- Critics have raised concerns about partnering with the UAE on such sensitive technology, given the country’s close ties with China. The Biden administration imposed strict oversight of exports of U.S.-made AI chips to the Middle East and other regions, due to concerns that the semiconductors would be diverted to China.
- Experts also warn that the deal could mean that in the coming years, the world’s biggest data centers will be in the Middle East, rather than the U.S.
- The race for AI dominance has been a key part of the overall U.S.-China competition, with both sides heavily investing in AI research and development. The U.S. has imposed export controls to restrict China’s access to the most advanced AI chips and equipment. Competition in the AI space is part of the wider battle for leadership in global digital infrastructure and data ecosystems.
The Cipher Brief: What concerns and overall reactions do you have, given the recent U.S. AI deals with the Gulf states?
Egan: Something that concerns me and needs to be worked out over time is what security measures are being put in place to safeguard U.S. interests with these deals. Experts and policymakers broadly agree that AI has potential significant dual-use capabilities – that's why we've had export controls on them to date, and why there's been so much competition with China to ensure the U.S. stays ahead.
The U.S. has been the clear leader in AI, in terms of models, but perhaps more importantly, in terms of having the computational resources, the massive data centers filled with thousands and thousands of chips, really specialized chips and hardware that enable advanced AI training, refinement, and then deployment. What we're seeing now is that the U.S. buildup is starting to stall. That's because of domestic energy constraints, permitting and regulations, and the ability to build out massive data centers with energy infrastructure to support them.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia are non-democratic countries. They don't have the same constraints when it comes to regulatory review, permitting review, or environmental protections, and they're able to override legislation overnight if they need to, to achieve their national interests. So when I see these really large deals of massive amounts of chips and computational resources going to countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, my first question is, how are we ensuring that the U.S. maintains a lead in terms of having the greatest capabilities? And then the second is, how are we ensuring that these chips aren't diverted to other countries of concern? China is the largest trading partner of both the UAE and Saudi Arabia. We should make sure we're considering these deals in that broader context.
Adamson: The UAE is incredibly serious about their goal of becoming a global AI leader. A lot of countries have aspirations and strategy documents to eventually lead in various elements of the AI supply chain. But the UAE, in terms of its energy capacity and financial spending that they're pouring into the AI landscape, is truly one of a kind in this area. And it really is developing as a middle and emerging power in the U.S.-China competition.
How does the United States engage with ambitious emerging powers in this area who – including the UAE – have not always been complete U.S. allies in this space, and have quite close ties to China? This has always been a question, a very national-security-focused question. So a lot of these companies that are spending tons of money in the UAE – U.S. hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft, have really seen it as a big opportunity to get the energy, to get the financial capital that they need and that they argue is lacking in the United States right now.
The Cipher Brief: What concerns you most from a national security perspective?
Adamson: There are some real security concerns here. To start with, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have deep ties to China in various parts of their economies, including in emerging and critical technologies. Despite claims of decoupling at various points in time, for the UAE in particular, a lot of people in Washington have argued that shipping our chips to the UAE or to the Gulf in general, and offshoring this massive national security asset and competitive asset, is potentially offering a backdoor to China to access cutting-edge compute that we are completely blocking through export controls.
That said, plenty of companies, including U.S. companies who are involved in these deals, have stressed that this is not a backdoor to China. [They say] there are strict security controls that are being put in place that will stop any Chinese access to these chips. For example, Chinese nationals are barred from any entry into a lot of these data centers. I myself have visited one of these data centers in the UAE and saw a lot of the security controls that were in place. These are robust security controls in many ways. However, I think there are a lot of things that we need to think about very carefully, because once these chips have been exported, you really are not getting them back anytime soon. So you need to be sure and work with the U.S. hyperscalers who are operating about 80 % of the compute capacity that's being shipped to the UAE, to ensure that these really are stringent controls and that the Commerce Department has the capacity to monitor and to check up on these security controls being put in place.
Egan: There's two potential ways that China could gain access to these technologies through these deals. The first is not having proper due diligence on ensuring that the chips that are sent to these countries stay in these countries. We're talking about export diversion and chip smuggling to China. That can be pretty well managed with things like inspections and safeguards, and potentially even new technologies on the chips themselves that allow for the geolocation tracking of the chips, so you can tell if it leaves the designated country. But another more concerning way that China could get access to such capabilities is through the cloud. You don't actually need to own the chips and the massive data centers to use them and to benefit from them.
At the end of the day, we're concerned about these dual-use capabilities that China can't already get access to – the massive amounts of chips used for training these frontier or large-language models that are really driving forward capabilities. And that's where you need to have much greater due diligence, both in terms of who's using the chips – are they using them through a shell company? – and how can we ensure that this isn't actually a CCP-linked actor using these massive data centers to do things for nefarious purposes?
Adamson: Another concern is just thinking about these countries alone, without the China component. These are non-democratic countries with a history of surveillance and human rights abuses and we are giving them some of our best technology out there. And more broadly, today's allies are potentially tomorrow's competitors. Advanced AI chips are one of the biggest bargaining powers that the United States has at the moment. We want to make sure that we're not giving away that advantage too quickly. This is an issue that the Biden administration tried to address with a last-minute export control framework called the AI diffusion framework. And it really tried to think about how the U.S. can deploy cutting-edge AI compute in a very measured and thoughtful way. It's something that the Trump administration recently revoked, and we now have this question of how much do we as the United States diffuse our technology and flood the market with U.S. technology? And then how do we balance the security controls and concerns that we see from that?
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The Cipher Brief: What kind of guardrails would be necessary to protect our interests in this space?
Egan: The first is looking at know-your-customer regimes. And it can't just be an on-paper regime. We do this in the banking sector to say, you need to understand who your customers are, so that if there's large amounts of money changing hands, you can quickly identify money laundering and terrorism financing and put a stop to that. In the compute space, we don't actually have any obligations at the moment, even in the U.S., to understand to a great level of depth who the customers are who are using the compute. Often you get that information as part of your due diligence in your business, to understand who these customers are that are spending a lot of money. But once you outsource those obligations to another country, it's much harder to ensure that they're being done correctly.
The risk of shell companies also adds more complexity. Even on the chip smuggling side, we've seen TSMC, the largest chip manufacturer making these AI chips, actually send a lot of them to Huawei through the use of a shell company. And they just said, Well, it didn't say it was Huawei. It was much more complex than that, but they essentially didn't do deep due diligence to ensure that this company was legitimate.
So going forward with these deals, I think there's a lot of detail that we don't yet know and potentially a lot of detail being worked out.
Adamson: We have a government-to-government agreement [with the UAE], which involves some security pledges. The U.S. has in the past enforced very strict security requirements to any chips that are shipped abroad – regular reporting and monitoring of what these chips are being used for. Now with the Trump administration having revoked the AI diffusion rule and its entire stance on U.S. export controls a little less clear, the specifics of the security controls are a little vague. We know that security is an important commitment from the Trump administration, but to the extent that we can say what exactly these controls look like and how they are going to be implemented by the U.S. Department of Commerce, is a bit hazy at the moment.
David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto czar, has been a big proponent of these deals and has emphasized the concerns of diversion as something that can be easily addressed with security agreements and a “trust-but-verify” approach. The next logical step in implementing these deals is, what does this trust-but-verify approach really look like? The details of those security concerns are yet to be hashed out.
The Cipher Brief: Supporters of these deals argue that despite the concerns about China, these moves are necessary in order to expand American influence and outflank China in the global AI race. Do you think if the proper guardrails are put in place and the due diligence is done, that these deals can serve both strategic and economic goals without compromising our security?
Egan: I think it is going to be very difficult but not impossible to get sufficient guardrails that are sufficiently enforced. But it will take dedicated effort and attention. This is not a small effort and the U.S. government needs to be willing to put a lot of resources and attention into this space to ensure success.
I am sympathetic to the point that you can't just say, none of the rest of the world can have U.S. technology. It does make sense for the U.S. to be the partner of choice, particularly in compute, which is physical and sticky infrastructure that people are less likely to just jump ship to move away from. And so that's where I think it's really important we do see exports happening. But you want to ensure that the U.S. maintains the lead in terms of the largest data centers in the world, because that's where we're most likely to see new emerging capabilities that could have big national security implications.
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The Cipher Brief: These deals are being cut with countries that have more of an authoritarian regime. Should we be concerned about giving transformative AI technologies over to countries like that? Should democracy be a prerequisite for cutting a deal with a country in terms of AI?
Egan: I think it's very hard to say democracy has to be a prerequisite, because the people you're making deals with are not going to sign up to that. And I think it's important to not take a binary approach of are you democratic or not, but actually look at the incentives and the interests, and where interests align and differ and to take that approach. I think we should be bringing more countries on board with transformative capabilities.
The Cipher Brief: Where does Saudi Arabia come into this? I know there's been a lot of focus on the UAE, but what about Saudi Arabia and these AI deals?
Adamson: Saudi Arabia is incredibly ambitious in its AI goals. During President Trump's visit to the UAE and to Saudi, there were some major deals that were announced there as well. Saudi Arabia had recently set up a AI company called Humain, which is a hundred-billion-dollar investment vehicle to generate AI infrastructure and an AI hub within Saudi Arabia. A lot of US. hyperscalers in the last weeks have announced major deals with Humain to build out that infrastructure within Saudi Arabia, including the shipment of tens to hundreds of thousands of chips. For example, Google had a $10 billion investment deal that was announced with Humain recently. AWS, AMD, the U.S. chipmaker NVIDIA – they have all announced deals in the last week with Humain and with the Saudi government.
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