
One month before Sam Altman was pushed out of OpenAI by the company’s board, the superstar chief executive traveled to Dubai to broker an unusual partnership. On October 18, OpenAI announced it would allow G42, an Emirati technology firm with close ties to the country’s leadership, to deploy the U.S. company’s artificial intelligence technology in the United Arab Emirates and the broader Middle East region.
“At the core of our mission lies the pursuit of AI as a transformative force for good, fueling innovation and progress,” said Peng Xiao, G42’s chief executive officer. “Our partnership with OpenAI transcends technological synergy; it’s a convergence of value and vision.”

A closer look at G42 and Xiao calls into question that benevolent mission. On Monday, The New York Times published an article about U.S. intelligence concerns that G42 may be seeking to act as a conduit for China to obtain sensitive technology. An examination by The Wire China of corporate records and company press releases reveals further, previously unreported details about G42, which shed light on its entanglement with a range of high tech industries in the world’s second-largest economy.
These ties have made G42 emblematic of the new role the Emirates is playing in U.S.-China geopolitical and technological competition. While the UAE is “trying to position themselves at the center of a changing economic arrangement,” says Matthew Pines, a director at SentinelOne, a cyber security firm, “China has used the Emirates as a main jumping off point for influence in their region. G42 may be a loophole for China to get access to this technology. It essentially can act as a middle man.”
Any sort of deal or arrangement or partnership that is providing capabilities, resources or data to G42 deserves scrutiny.
Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab
That role could cause concern for U.S. partners of G42 such as OpenAI and Microsoft, which brokered a deal with G42 in April to “explore acceleration of UAE’s digital transformation.”
“Any sort of deal or arrangement or partnership that is providing capabilities, resources or data to G42 deserves scrutiny,” says Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, a technology watchdog group based at the University of Toronto that has extensively studied G42. “Is that capability being used for dual purposes, both for the company and for intelligence purposes?”

In response to questions from The Wire, G42 said, “We have been at the forefront of technological advancements, partnering with leading companies and institutions with shared values, and developing responsible AI solutions across industry verticals… The response from our clients and partners has been overwhelmingly positive, as has been our work on AI governance, ethics, and regulation.” OpenAI, Microsoft, and a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment.
G42 — a sprawling company with ventures in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and geospatial mapping — was founded in 2018 by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, a member of the UAE royal family and the country’s national security advisor. It has received an undisclosed investment from Mubadala, the Emirati sovereign wealth fund, and Silver Lake, the American private equity giant.
Xiao, who often appears in fitted suits with no tie, has a controversial business track record. After attending college and graduate school in the U.S., he served as the chief technology officer for Virginia-based MicroStrategy, a listed technology firm, according to his LinkedIn account. In 2015, he became the CEO of Pegasus, a subsidiary of UAE-based Dark Matter, a surveillance firm which once hired former American intelligence officials to develop a system that was later used to spy on opponents of the Emirati government, according to a Reuters investigation.
Xiao and G42 were also involved in the creation of ToTok, an app which was used by the the UAE government to spy on millions of phones, according to a New York Times investigation. ToTok used technology from a Chinese firm, Beijing Yeecall Interactive Network Technology, according to statements made by ToTok executives.

But G42 and Xiao’s footprints in China go much deeper. In 2015, Pegasus opened a subsidiary in China, Pegasus Technology Beijing, where Xiao is the executive director, according to WireScreen, the data platform. It’s unclear what the activities of the Chinese subsidiary were, but two years later, Pegasus signed an agreement with Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant that had been sanctioned by the U.S. government, to jointly develop smart city and public safety technology.
G42 has since opened two subsidiaries in China, according to corporate records reviewed by The Wire: G42 Shanghai Investment and Beijing Qingzi Future Network Technology, both of which are run by Zhang Xiaoping. Zhang is G42’s chief investment officer and the former chief operating officer of Yitu Technology, a leading Chinese AI firm that was sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2019 for allegedly aiding the oppression and surveillance of China’s Uyghur population. WireScreen data also indicates that the Chinese operations of G42 and Pegasus, Xiao’s former venture, overlap — the general manager of Beijing Qingzi, Li Xiaoxu, is also the supervisor of Pegasus’s Chinese subsidiary.

Some of G42’s earliest investments were also in Chinese firms. In 2019, G42 invested in Guangzhou HeyGears Technology, a 3D printing firm where, according to WireScreen data, Xiao is the vice chairman. HeyGears also has operations in California. That same year, G42 invested in a Chinese e-commerce firm called Jollychic, which focuses on Middle Eastern consumers.
In 2023, G42 set up 42X Fund, a $10 billion investment fund, and hired Jason Hu, a former executive at online shopping platform JD.com, to run its Shanghai office. This year, that fund took a $100 million stake in Bytedance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, and invested in JD Industrial Products, a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, according to PitchBook.

One arm of G42 which has sparked particular concern among U.S. officials, according to The New York Times, is Presight, an AI business that has contracts to develop AI technology for the UAE government, the Maldives Police, and the Kazakhstan capital of Astana. Presight has links with China too: before going public in March in Abu Dhabi, it brokered an agreement with the Singapore arm of a Chinese firm, Tongdun Technology, to cooperate on AI and big data solutions for governments and companies. Presight’s chief technology officer, Zhou Xiaodong, is a Tsinghua-educated engineer who previously worked at Pegasus and MicroStrategy, both firms where Xiao also worked.
In a video taken at the World Police Summit in 2023, Zhou said that “law enforcement is our main pillar.” At the summit, according to a company announcement, Presight featured a “Presight Forensic Lab” — a product “designed to process unstructured media content from digital devices, such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, servers” — and its “Aliengo Robot,” a police robotic dog.
G42’s work in healthcare and genomics, partly through its healthcare arm Hayat Biotech, also has deep connections to China. G42 and Sinopharm partnered to conduct a Covid vaccine trial in 2020, and the two firms formed a joint venture to manufacture the Covid vaccine for the Middle East. In 2020, G42 announced that it would create a joint Covid detection lab with BGI Genomics. In March, the U.S. government sanctioned three BGI units.

Despite repeated criticism from the U.S. government, past brushes with controversy, and an accelerating U.S.-China tech competition, Xiao and his network of business partners seem undeterred. Zhang Lei and Xu Jiajun, the two ex-Huawei executives who founded Beijing Yeecall, which helped G42 set up ToTok, have a new venture bridging China and the UAE. The firm, which is called Neuxnet, is developing a “super app” for messaging, calling, and payment in the UAE market as well as a smart city product, according to its website. It has also developed an online learning platform called Neukol, which is accessible in the U.S..
Neuxnet is ultimately owned by a Chinese firm, Anxin Zhitong Nanjing Technology, in which the Jiangsu provincial government and the Shenzhen government have a stake, according to corporate records reviewed by The Wire. Sinovation Ventures, the firm founded by Kai-Fu Lee, the Taiwanese AI pioneer, invested in their previous venture, Beijing Yeecall. The Wire did not find any connection between Neuxnet and G42 or Xiao.
In an interview this September, Zhang Lei, the Neuxnet founder, described the “gold rush” phenomenon of Chinese high tech entrepreneurs expanding in Middle Eastern markets.
“As the East and West enter an economic downturn, a multipolar world will emerge, with more confrontation than cooperation,” he said. By attracting more Chinese business partners to the Gulf state, he added, “the UAE hopes to strike a balance between East and West.”

Katrina Northrop is a former staff writer at The Wire China, and joined The Washington Post in August 2024. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Providence Journal, and SupChina. In 2023, Katrina won the SOPA Award for Young Journalists for a “standout and impactful body of investigative work on China’s economic influence.” @NorthropKatrina