The world's first dedicated AI minister says the safety debate is aimed at the wrong generation of models. The UAE's Omar Sultan Al Olama argues the previous generation is already safe, already capable, and mostly sitting unused: "Everyone talks about AI being dangerous, and I know that there are calls right now and conversations in Washington, other places talking about restricting AI, and it's because these new models are dangerous." "What I always say is we don't need to look at these new models. Let's look at the previous models that were very capable, still very capable." "Not a single government has used those models that are not dangerous to implement them in ways that improve people's lives." That absolute is the charge he is making, not a measured finding. On his own government: "In the UAE, we try to do that. So most government services today have LLMs, and they're not the Astras or the Fables, they're actually the older models, answering customer inquiries." "You just speak to an agent, tell the agent what you need, it will do the full process for you. And the quality of life improvement is incredible. That's what we should focus on." He points at Abu Dhabi's government services app as the example. Deliberately, it runs on older models. He is a serving minister describing his own government's record. The question it raises elsewhere is what could already be deployed on models whose risk profile is understood. - H.E. Omar Sultan Al Olama (@OmarSAlolama), UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, with Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 2026.

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