UAE Recruiting US Personnel Displaced by DOGE to Work on AI for its Military
A UAE brigadier general received permission from the Pentagon to recruit former members of the Defense Digital Service to work on artificial intelligence for the UAE military — despite past warnings from US spy agencies and federal lawmakers that UAE could share AI technologies with China
Former workers with the Defense Department’s Defense Digital Service (DDS), who resigned en-masse last month from their jobs due to encroachment by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, have been approached for recruitment by the United Arab Emirates to work on artificial intelligence for the oil kingdom’s armed forces.
A top UAE military officer met with departing DDS staff last month to offer them jobs, saying he would hire all of them – about 30 workers in total – and had an extensive budget to pay them.
As federal agencies, under the direction of DOGE, continue to fire thousands of workers, it’s no secret that foreign intelligence agencies and governments are interested in recruiting American workers who possess valuable skills and expertise the US government no longer wants. But the recruitment effort from the UAE comes a year after US intelligence agencies and federal lawmakers expressed alarm about UAE ties to the People’s Republic of China and the potential for the UAE to share US-developed AI innovations and other technologies with the PRC.
The meeting between the DDS workers and the UAE military officer included an AI executive based in Abu Dhabi who has direct ties to an Emirati firm singled out last year by US intelligence officials and federal lawmakers for alleged work with China’s government and intelligence services, raising questions about how technologies done by US workers recruited to the UAE could be used and shared.
The White House didn't respond to a request for comment.
US-Approved Recruitment
The UAE officer who made the pitch to recruit the US workers went through official channels by contacting a U.S. Department of Defense liaison office before reaching out directly to departing DDS workers and meeting with at least two of them in person for discussion.
According to details shared variously by four former DDS employees who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the issue freely, Brigadier General Musallam Al Rashidi, director of the Office of His Highness, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, first reached out to someone at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Attaché Office (DAO) after reading a Politico story published last month about the DDS staff resigning en-masse in the wake of an incursion from DOGE.
The DAO liaises with foreign governments about US defense-related matters, and Al Rashidi asked the Attache Office to provide contact information for Jennifer Hay, then head of DDS, who was quoted in the Politico story discussing her resignation with staff.
Because the initial email from Al Rashidi to Hay came from a Hotmail address with the numbers “69” after the general’s name, one worker says they weren’t sure whether the outreach was legitimate.
“The only reason we thought this was real was because it came through the Defense attache office,” the worker says.
Al Rashidi proposed that Hay and her entire DDS team move to Abu Dhabi to work on artificial intelligence for the UAE’s Ministry of Defense, according to two former DDS workers familiar with the conversation. He told Hay that the UAE planned to invest a trillion dollars in artificial intelligence for its ministry of defense over the next decade and wanted to set up the UAE’s own AI-focused digital service.
“They need a team of people who are familiar with defense-use cases to stand up their digital service,” one of the former DDS workers said the general explained, "and he wanted … the entire team to move to Abu Dhabi to set this organization up.”
Until resigning last month, the DDS team consisted of about 30 engineers, software developers, project managers, data scientists, cybersecurity experts and others, located in Texas, California, the District of Columbia and other parts of the country. DDS, sometimes referred to as the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” was created about a decade ago to provide innovative and varied tech solutions to the Pentagon — from the critical to the mundane. DDS, for example, reportedly built tools to assist the military during its withdrawal from Afghanistan and helped develop drone detection technologies and weapons systems. But the team has also worked on efficiency projects to make it easier for soldiers to access documents or lesson the paperwork needed for mission planning or after-action reports.
Members of DOGE have systematically driven out workers across government agencies and military offices over the last four months, but the former DDS workers say they believed they would be asked to partner with DOGE in its efficiency plans, since improving efficiency is part of what DDS does. When it became clear, however, that DOGE had no interest in absorbing their skills and expertise, Hay decided to resign as director, with her DDS staff opting to join her. One of the former workers says it wasn’t a hard decision to make.
The staff had initially met hopefully with members of DOGE at the invitation of deputy defense secretary’s office. “We were introduced as a team of engineers who serve as technical expertise inside [DoD] to ensure the department is buying the best technology and modernization initiatives.” But the staffer says DOGE “were not interested in working with us.”
That wasn’t the case with General Al Rashidi, however.
One worker who met with the general says there wasn’t anything that felt “shady” about the interaction or the general's offer. Another worker got the impression the general was simply under pressure from his superiors to launch the AI initiative, saw “a wealth of skills” leaving the US government, and decided to seize the opportunity to hire a proven team.
According to this former DDS staffer, the general said the work wouldn’t necessarily be “specific to defense-use cases” but might also expand into health care and other areas.
Two DDS workers based in Washington, DC, then met with Al Rashidi in person when he visited the US last month. They met in a DC hotel, along with the general’s assistant and Alex Kipman, CEO and founder of Analog AI, an artificial intelligence firm based in Abu Dhabi. Kipman was there to provide perspective on life and work in the oil kingdom, one of the DDS workers says.
“They were all fairly technically savvy,” says the worker. “This wasn’t just a paperwork team. They had done their research on the space and on the [DDS] team and were very earnest in their desire to get us over there to help out.”
Both of the DDS workers who met with the general have worked on classified projects for the US military — for US CentCom and for Task Force Lima, a project overseen by the Pentagon’s Office of the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer to develop AI capabilities for use across the Defense Department. The general did not seem to single out the two workers for the hotel meeting because of their backgrounds, one of them says; Hay asked them to meet with the general since they are two of only a small number of DDS workers based in DC, where the general planned to visit for other official business.
But the meeting raises questions and concerns for a number of reasons.
China and Intelligence Ties
Kipman’s firm, Analog AI, was launched last year in Abu Dhabi by Group 42 (G42), an artificial intelligence holding firm based in the UAE, whose controlling shareholder is Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's national security advisor and brother to the country’s ruler. G42, which has an investment arm, is considered a crowning achievement for the UAE, which hopes to position itself as a global leader in artificial intelligence at a level to rival its position as an oil producer.
But in late 2023, US intelligence officials warned about a series of unspecified G42 ties to the Chinese government and intelligence services and about its investments in Chinese technology firms, including ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. G42 reportedly owned a $100 million stake in the firm at the time the US was threatening to ban TikTok in the US and sanction its parent company.
Last year, former Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI), then chair of the House Select Committee on Competition with the Chinese Communist Party, called for an investigation into G42’s ties with China and for export licenses to be imposed to prevent US businesses from selling products to G42 and other UAE firms, amid concerns that G42 could funnel AI advancements and other technologies developed by the US to the PRC, particularly its military and intelligence agencies.
Among its concerns, the House Committee cited G42’s connections to Dark Matter, a controversial UAE-based firm that purports to be a cybersecurity firm but reportedly developed spy tools and conducted hacking operations for UAE intelligence services. The Committee asserted that Dark Matter was affiliated with five companies in China, including one called Dark Matter AI.
G42’s current CEO, Peng Xiao, also “operates and is affiliated with an expansive network of UAE and PRC-based companies that develop dual-use technologies and materially support PRC military-civil fusion and human rights abuses,” according to the Committee. Xiao, who keeps a low profile, was born in China but reportedly gained US citizenship after moving to the states for college and work before renouncing his US citizenship to take up Emirati citizenship. He also reportedly once held a leadership position with ISS Pegasus, a Dark Matter subsidiary (not to be confused with the Pegasus spy product made by the Israeli firm NSO Group). Dark Matter’s Pegasus reportedly opened a subsidiary in China called Pegasus Technology Beijing, where Xiao serves as executive director. In 2017, Pegasus announced a deal with Huawei to develop surveillance technologies for police forces.
Dark Matter has a complicated history around its own recruitment of former US workers. A decade ago the company recruited former operators and analysts from the US National Security Agency and other parts of the US intelligence and security community to take what they thought were cybersecurity jobs in the UAE, helping the UAE secure its networks. But they soon discovered they were actually hired to build spy tools and conduct offensive hacking operations and surveillance on behalf of the UAE’s National Electronic Security Authority, or NESA (the UAE’s equivalent of the NSA). Over time they were asked to help the UAE hack other nations, royal family members and even dissidents and journalists. The Justice Department later charged three of the US recruits with violating export control laws for providing the UAE with regulated technology and services without a license and with violating the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The former DDS worker who met with General Al Rashidi and Alex Kipman wasn’t aware of Kipman’s connections to G42 or about past concerns about G42 until Zero Day mentioned them.
Kipman did not respond to an inquiry from Zero Day. General Rashidi's assistant, contacted through an email address on a business card he provided to one of the DDS workers at the meeting, did not respond to an inquiry from Zero Day either. The House Select Committee also did not respond to a request for comment or Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), who serves on the committee.
Since the warnings last year issued by US spy agencies and lawmakers about G42 and its ties to China, the UAE firm announced it would withdraw all of its investments from Chinese companies. The UAE has also apparently provided the Trump administration with additional assurances about distancing itself from China, because last week, President Donald Trump and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan announced a joint plan to build the largest AI complex outside the US in the Emirates. The deal includes agreement for the UAE to "invest in, build, or finance” U.S. data centers on par with those in the Emirates as well as a commitment to implement protections that would prevent the transfer of US technologies outside the UAE, according to statements from the White House.
The White House did not respond to a request seeking comment.
This new environment of trust between the two countries may have been why the Pentagon’s Attache Office had no objection when General Al Rashidi expressed interest in recruiting departing DDS staffers to work on artificial intelligence in the UAE.
During the hotel meeting the recruitment pitch was less specific to military use-cases than the one given to Hay, one of the workers says.
“They said ‘You can do whatever you want; we just want you over here,” the worker says. “Which was unusual.”
He says the meeting touched on efficiency projects for the military, but the discussion was more about general government efficiency and urban modernization plans.
The worker described the general as “very nice” and said he seemed earnest in his interest in improving the UAE’s public services and making them more efficient. Although the general didn’t provide specifics on salary compensation if they came to work in the UAE, he said “if you guys want to come over and join … we have money for you,” the worker says.
The worker says the interest in he and his DDS colleagues makes sense since they and other government tech workers pushed out by DOGE have very niche skills and don’t often hit the open job market. Generally, they move from job to job behind the scenes within government, he says, and are rarely available for hire elsewhere.
“I think [the UAE] is just trying to take advantage of the federal government, at large, shedding technologist and experts like mad,” the worker says. “So if you are a country with funding, this is a great time to pick up proven experts” who ordinarily wouldn’t be available for hire.
None of the former DDS workers who spoke with Zero Day expressed interest in accepting the proposal from the UAE, however.
“The reality is, I want to work for my own government,” says one of the workers who has worked on US classified projects “I’m uncomfortable working for a foreign government in general, but definitely uncomfortable working for a foreign government that doesn’t have democratic values.”
He’s spoken with other former DDS workers, however, whose projects at DDS were more focused on public safety and health projects who have told him they are considering it.
The workers expressed frustration at the “slash and burn” tactics of DOGE that are forcing out talented people from the US government and increasing the likelihood that some of these workers could turn against the US or inadvertently expose secrets in jobs that they take overseas. The UAE outreach was not troubling to them because the general approached the DoD before reaching out to the director of DDS. But some former staffers of DDS have had different experiences with recruiters contacting them — some of whom have refused to identify the country they’re based in or provide suspicious information that can’t be confirmed.
One worker says colleagues have been approached through LinkedIn or Reddit by entities who offer to double their former government salary, and one company claiming to be based in the UK could not be found in any online search results.
“When we asked around with UK colleagues, no one has any record of them and could not confirm the existence of the organization,” one of the former DDS workers says. “They claimed they were … working on collections technologies for advertising purposes,” but no one could confirm the claim.
He says the recruitment efforts have put his colleagues on edge.
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See also:
Former NSA Hacker Describes Being Recruited for UAE Spy Program
What It Means that the U.S. Is Conducting Offensive Cyber Operations Against Russia