A Samsung memory chip worker earning about $60,000 a year could receive roughly $560,000 in bonuses before tax, according to the company’s largest union. Its estimate includes both Samsung’s existing profit-sharing bonus and a new special payment. Samsung hasn’t confirmed the amount. On October 7, the company outlined how that special bonus would work: 10.5% […]

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TEL AVIV – Every Israeli election of the past decade has been sold as the last chance to save the country, and every one has ended in the same place: a long night of counting, followed by weeks of bargaining among men who swore they would never sit together. The vote on October 27 has a stronger […]

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The apparent attempted hijacking of a Flydubai flight carrying 170 mostly Israeli passengers was another reminder to Israelis of the constant threat of terror and war. Only the bravery of the chief pilot and passengers prevented a major disaster. A few hours earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video warning of attempts to harm […]

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On the night of 12 November 1993, a slim, young Brazilian named Royce Gracie stepped into an octagonal cage in Denver, Colorado, and found himself staring up into the eyes of a giant. Gerard Gordeau, a Dutch kickboxer, stood five inches taller, weighed almost three stone more than him, and had an extra decade of fighting experience under his belt. Now the pair were about to engage in bare-knuckle combat: no judges, no separation of opponents by size, no respite until someone either got knocked out cold or begged for mercy.

The fight lasted barely 100 seconds. In that time, Gracie calmly tripped Gordeau up, jumped on his back, and clutched at his throat, forcing the big man to hammer the floor in submission.

About 80,000 pay-per-view spectators watched Gracie’s legendary victory – the finale of the first ever Ultimate Fighting Championship – live on television. Among them was an unassuming business studies student living in San Diego, California. Mesmerised by what he had seen, the student presented himself at a local martial arts academy that specialised in Brazilian jiu-jitsu – the discipline employed by Gracie to humble Gordeau in the cage – and asked to begin lessons. His classmates found it hard to take the newcomer seriously. “I was there the day he showed up,” said Kid Peligro, who went on to become one of the biggest jiu-jitsu stars in the world. “He was wearing shorts, flip-flops and a tank-top; he sat in the corner and barely spoke to anybody.”

The student, who introduced himself as Ben, was in his mid-20s and hailed from the Middle East, but revealed little else about his background. Peligro assumed that he served as the butler or bodyguard to the rich Englishman who sometimes accompanied him to lessons. “Ben was quiet, and he was dedicated,” Peligro told me. “He would often stay behind after class to sweep the mats.” Ben also took physical pain in his stride, even when it involved fractured bones. “If you trained in jiu-jitsu in the 1990s, you were going to get hurt,” said Bobby Razak, a film producer and martial arts enthusiast. “It wasn’t like it is now: very clean, very professional. Back then, it was raw.”

After more than a year of training, Ben made a startling announcement: he was about to return home to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, and would be taking the academy’s founder, Nelson Monteiro, along with him. Other invitations soon followed. Rumours spread that Ben was trying to establish his own martial arts centre on the shores of the Persian Gulf. One day, Peligro and his wife were sent a pair of first-class flight tickets to the UAE, worth $24,000 each. When they stepped off the plane, they were astonished to see pictures of a familiar-looking man – clearly Ben’s father – everywhere they turned, from billboards to banknotes. “Ben’s training centre turned out to be one of his family’s palaces,” Peligro said, still marvelling at the memory. “It’s like a fairytale.”

For those trying to uncover the truth behind His Highness Sheikh Tahnoon bin (or “Ben”) Zayed Al Nahyan – royal fixer, reclusive spymaster, financial behemoth – fairytales are nearly all we have to go on. Tahnoon, who really did enrol in Nelson Monteiro’s class under a pseudonym and eventually went on to become a jiu-jitsu black belt in his own right, now sits atop an economic fortune larger than the GDP of several major countries, and is closely entwined both personally and financially with the Trump White House. The global holdings overseen by Tahnoon span windfarms in Scotland and spaceships in Texas, Rihanna’s lingerie line and Richard Caring’s Ivy restaurants. From hospitals to housing blocks, solar farms to ski resorts, there is almost no place on Earth untouched by his financial firepower.

But despite his ever-growing influence on the world stage, Tahnoon prefers to remain in the shadows. He has never given a substantive interview to the press. Those who have worked closely with him are almost always made to sign non-disclosure agreements. Very few people outside the UAE even know his name. “He’s quiet,” says one former US national security official, “and he’s always everywhere.” Sheikh Tahnoon did not respond to an interview request for this article. The UAE foreign ministry did not offer any other senior government figure for interview, and declined to provide any comment.

Tahnoon’s power is soon going to extend over more human lives than ever before. As one of the most important AI financiers on the planet, he is rapidly embedding himself within the infrastructure that will underpin our digital future: its information pipelines and its microchip foundries, its datacentres and the enormous energy plants needed to power and cool them. Some see him as a technological prophet and saviour. Others compare him to a Bond villain. So who is the real “Ben”, and what are his plans for the rest of us?

Anyone trying to find Sheikh Tahnoon must first navigate concentric circles of gatekeepers. These include his closest business associates, as well as a cast of more colourful characters: the former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, for example, or Melissa Moncada, one-time winner of the Miss Globe Colombia beauty pageant, and now a fitness entrepreneur. Even if you get this far, it may not be enough to be granted an audience, and supplicants go to extraordinary lengths to stand out from the crowd.

These scattered landmarks form the backstage of the modern Emirates. Together, they also tell the story of the six brothers who have come to dominate the country – a story that began more than half a century ago, with their father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the UAE’s first leader following independence from Britain in 1971. During his 33-year reign, a loose network of Bedouin tribespeople living among mud-brick forts and palm-frond houses was transformed into an oil-rich regional superpower, home to some of the tallest buildings on Earth.

Zayed married seven times and is believed to have fathered at least 30 children. But it was the offspring of his third and favourite wife, Fatima Al Ketbi, who – under her tutelage – emerged as their nation’s powerbrokers. Tahnoon was one of them. Today, he and his siblings – known as the bani Fatima, or “sons of Fatima” – sit at the apex of arguably the wealthiest dynasty in the world.

Tahnoon and his brothers grew up steeped in a worldview that placed their family at the centre of the universe. Any form of dissent was seen as an existential threat, not just to their own power but also to the small and fragile state they were responsible for protecting. “The family is the first school of values, the authentic guardian of identity, and the truest source of trust and belonging,” their mother, Fatima, once said, reflecting both the paternalistic ethics that prevail among the Emirati elite, and the Al Nahyans’ visceral hostility towards alternative ideologies such as socialism or political Islam. By the time Tahnoon returned from the US in 1995, a state-sponsored crackdown on Islamist civil society groups was under way, alongside reprisals against smaller emirates that resisted it.

During this period, the UAE’s leadership became increasingly conscious that money alone could not buy them international clout. Despite oil finds in the Gulf, it was the big Arab republics such as Egypt and Syria that still dominated the Middle East, both diplomatically and culturally. Military strength and strategic influence were needed to propel the Emirates into the big time. In the final years of his reign, Sheikh Zayed ensured that the bani Fatima were favourably positioned to drive this project forward.

As a younger brother, Tahnoon knew that the Abu Dhabi throne – and consequently the presidency of the UAE, which always accompanies it – was not destined for him. Instead, he was given the task of running his father’s private department, which oversaw Sheikh Zayed’s extensive personal assets, including palaces, farms and overseas landholdings such as London’s Berkeley Square. The role demanded a blend of charm and coercion, and the deployment of hard cash. By the late 1990s Tahnoon was making the latter his speciality, founding a company called the Royal Group that became the primary investment vehicle for his family’s many business interests. The group’s assets are currently worth $300bn.

Following Sheikh Zayed’s death in 2004, Tahnoon’s reputation as the UAE’s top money man grew. As comfortable in the boardrooms of Wall Street as he was in the Emirati majlis (the traditional court of the tribal ruler), Tahnoon melded the rhetoric of Bedouin values – duty, loyalty and humility – with a new vocabulary of technocratic managerialism. Today, the country’s largest sovereign wealth vehicle is run by Tahnoon; so is First Abu Dhabi Bank, its largest lender, and Alterra, the biggest climate investment fund in the world. In the UK alone, Tahnoon oversees healthcare providers and property giants, and controls investments in public utilities such as Thames Water. The economic empire he oversees is estimated to be worth about $1.5tr, as large as the entire economic output of Indonesia or Turkey.

But the line between Tahnoon’s personal fortune, the wider wealth of the Abu Dhabi royal family, and collective assets held – at least in theory – by the citizenry of the UAE, is blurry. According to the bani Fatima, that division is moot, as the wellbeing of the Al Nahyans is indistinguishable from the wellbeing of the nation at large. Not everyone agrees. “A lot of merchants in the UAE complain constantly – very quietly, very privately – about how Tahnoon crowds them out of the market,” Mira Al Hussein, an Emirati sociologist based at the University of Edinburgh, told me. In healthcare, for example, sovereign wealth funds and Tahnoon’s own corporate vehicles dominate the local industry; the private sector “cannot compete”, one senior executive recently told the Financial Times. “The general perception is that the country is a ship,” said Al Hussein, “and if that ship ever begins to sink, then the ruling family will jump off and take all of the wealth funds and investments and portfolios with them.”

Tahnoon is obsessed with winning. In the late 1990s, the sheikh became so determined to beat his brothers at the newly released video game Age of Empires – in which players attempt to transform pre-modern societies into monumental civilisations by hoarding resources and overpowering opponents – that he hired one of the game’s software developers to coach him. By the early 2000s, his attention had switched to chess. He personally financed the development of a refrigerator-sized supercomputer called Hydra, which soon became the most powerful chess player in the world, beating several grandmasters along the way. Hydra could only ever be used by a single person at a time. For hours at a stretch, day and night, that person was Tahnoon. In 2005, Hydra’s chief architect claimed in an online chess forum that Tahnoon was the greatest computer-chess freak alive.

Tahnoon has brought all these skills – fierce competitiveness, the careful accumulation of positional advantage, and an abiding fascination with melding human ingenuity and computing intelligence – to the financial realm. They have also proved vital in his other main role: as the man in charge of national security in the Emirates, and his country’s spymaster-in-chief.

Many of the individuals targeted by Tahnoon’s security apparatus can’t share their testimony. The UAE has a long history of enforced disappearances, secret detention sites and vicious reprisals against the family members of exiled dissidents – all extensively documented by international human rights organisations. But some survive to tell their tale.

In April 2018, Matthew Hedges, a young British academic, travelled to the UAE to conduct research for his PhD exploring the country’s national security strategy, a subject that touches directly on Tahnoon’s domain. By the end of his two-week visit, Hedges had started to feel uneasy. “I knew I was being followed,” he told me recently.

Entering Dubai airport on his way back to the UK, Hedges got no further than passport control. There he says he found a large group of masked men waiting for him, all dressed in black and carrying guns. He alleges that he was blindfolded, handcuffed and thrown in the back of an SUV. He was accused of working as a British spy and over the months of solitary confinement that followed, he says he was subjected to interrogations lasting up to 15 hours a day and made to swallow a cocktail of medications against his will. His captors allegedly threatened him with rendition to an overseas military base, and warned that they could harm his relatives. Following seven months of maltreatment, Hedges attempted to take his own life. “I knew their threats to be meaningful, because I knew the country,” he told me.

In the room where he was questioned by officials, Hedges says he saw bloodstains on the carpet and bloody footprints on the walls. “They were above my head height, and facing down,” he told me. “I’m over 6ft tall, so that means someone had been lifted up there.” When I asked Hedges who was ultimately responsible for his ordeal, he ran carefully up the chain of command within the Emirati security services, reciting names and job titles, before sitting quietly for a moment and taking a breath. “Then you get above the clouds,” he replied, eventually. “Then there is Tahnoon.” (In a government statement issued in 2023, the UAE insisted that Hedges “received entirely proper care … He was never subjected to, or threatened with, either torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any sort.”)

Hedges ultimately confessed to a series of crimes, but insists that he did so under duress. In November 2018, following a hearing that lasted only five minutes, at which there was no defence lawyer present, he was sentenced to life in jail by an Emirati court. Following a diplomatic row with the British government, he was later granted a royal pardon. After his release, the UAE government mounted a smear campaign against him that included the release of a 19-page dossier of personal information including a psychiatric report. Compared with many others who pass through the country’s interrogation cells, he got off lightly. “Hedges’ experience is unfortunately common in the UAE, and abuses against Emirati civil society are even more repressive,” said Joey Shea, a senior Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Supporters of the Emirati regime bridle at this sort of criticism. They insist that it is grounded in western resentment at the UAE’s rise, and overlooks the unique security threats the nation faces from hostile neighbours and ideological insurgents. “The UAE has become a success story, and that’s led to you guys thinking, ‘Wait, these were the little ducklings that we used to run and now look at what they’re doing,’” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati professor of political science who is well connected to ruling officials in the UAE. “I resent the claim that the UAE must ‘level up’ to international standards [on human rights]. You have your standard, we have ours.”

The Al Nahyan dynasty has good reason to feel insecure. Located on the tip of a landmass roiled by conflict to the north and south, and staring out across the Gulf at its far larger rival Iran, the UAE’s petro-riches make it an obvious target. Tahnoon and his brothers also know that their brand of autocratic monarchy is despised by political Islamists and pro-democracy Arab revolutionaries alike. Some 20 years ago, Christopher Davidson, an expert in Gulf politics at Durham University, spoke to one of the bani Fatima about the Emirates’ rising prestige. “He said to me, ‘You need to understand the mindset of this region. Others will try to take that away from us, or destroy us’,” Davidson recalled. “‘Whether it’s Iran, Yemen, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda … they’ll all be coming, one after another.’”

For the UAE’s leaders, the 9/11 attacks – perpetrated by a group of extremists that included two Emiratis – were a realisation of their darkest fears about violent enemies lurking within, and helped fuel an obsession with Islamism that persists to this day. (The UAE has been linked to covert funding and political support for far-right political parties in Europe who are seen to share Abu Dhabi’s perspective on this issue.) The US war on terror was also a moment of opportunity, enabling the Al Nahyans to present themselves to Washington as an island of stability within an otherwise forbidding region.

Throughout the 2000s, the Emirati regime ramped up its intelligence activities and increasingly focused on espionage technologies. The aim was to mitigate the country’s most obvious vulnerability: its tiny native population of 1.4 million people, which comprises only 11% of the UAE’s total residents, and makes it hard for the country to raise a significant army or to function in the absence of foreigners. By the end of the decade, it had struck a landmark security deal with the former US counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who was instrumental in lobbying Congress for more intrusive surveillance programmes both at home and abroad. Clarke moved out to Abu Dhabi and set up a secretive UAE spying unit, which was given the codename Project Raven.

Initially billed as a vital cog in the “war on terror”, Project Raven morphed into a vast and pervasive digital wiretap operation targeting not only Emiratis accused of terrorism, but many others merely suspected of being unfriendly to the UAE’s dictatorship. Although technically an Emirati initiative, much of the team running Project Raven were former US National Security Agency spies, Washington contractors and senior White House veterans. “The incentive was to help in the fight against terrorism,” Clarke later insisted. “The UAE is a very good counterterrorism partner.”

By 2011, when anti-government uprisings erupted across the Arab world, the focus of Project Raven’s energies had become clear. After a group of prominent Emirati judges, lawyers and journalists put their names to a petition calling for mild democratic reforms, the state’s response was uncompromising; over the next two years the majority of them were arrested, and dozens of signatories remain in jail today. More paranoid than ever, and harbouring fears that Emirati soldiers might refuse to turn their guns on fellow Muslims in the event of widespread street protests, the bani Fatima mobilised an 800-strong paramilitary force of Colombian and South African mercenaries to tighten their grip on power, and even greater resources were funnelled into digital hacking operations. To the Al Nahyans, mass politics was a threat: in their eyes, grateful subjects could only ever petition their leaders for concessions, never make demands of them as citizens. “The UAE’s internal security structure increasingly prioritised regime protection above all else,” said Mira Al Hussein.

It was against this backdrop that Tahnoon – alongside his role as the UAE’s money man – began rising up the ranks of the Emirati security establishment. In 2014, he became the country’s deputy national security adviser; two years later, he assumed the top job. As security chief, his new brief included some of the UAE’s most sensitive diplomatic missions, among them the breaking of a decades-long taboo in the Arab world by normalising relations with Israel. As the Middle East’s other leader in the field of cyber-espionage, Israeli intelligence had much to offer the Emiratis: not least access to Pegasus, the most advanced spyware ever built. With Pegasus, operatives were able to infiltrate almost any Apple or Android device without the user’s knowledge, and transform it into a permanent, pocket-sized spy.

Under Tahnoon’s stewardship, Project Raven – control of which had now passed into the hands of a private, state-linked Emirati company named DarkMatter – scaled up its hacking and surveillance activities. Local dissidents and suspicious foreigners on Emirati soil were targeted. But so, too, were human rights activists, journalists and politicians all over the world. Fiona Shackleton, a high-profile British divorce lawyer representing an estranged wife of the ruler of Dubai – whose other clients have included Prince Charles and Paul McCartney – was one such victim. Then UK prime minister Boris Johnson is believed to have been another. It seemed that no matter who you were, if you were deemed to threaten the interests of the Al Nahyan family and their friends, even tangentially, then you were a potential target.

In early 2019, a Reuters investigation – building on work by the Canadian research group The Citizen Lab – exposed much of Project Raven’s operations, and multiple legal proceedings were launched in the US against the initiative’s American contractors. Over the next year, Tahnoon officially shut down DarkMatter and broke apart its various entities. By that time, it appears he was nursing more ambitious plans.

A powerful new frontier in computing power – artificial intelligence – was just beginning to open up. To be genuinely transformative, this technology was going to require fantastical amounts of cash and data. By fusing together elements of his business and security empires, Tahnoon would be in a unique position to supply both. A company like no other was about to be born.

In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a superintelligent computer programme named Deep Thought is asked “the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything’”. After seven and a half million years, it finally delivers its famous answer: 42. Deep Thought goes on to say that, in order to explain its answer, it needs to design another giant computer programme. This one will be called “Earth”, and one of its core operational components will be human beings.

In this vision, the number 42 represents more than the meaning of life. It speaks to a world in which every facet of reality can ultimately be reduced to lines of code, and where ordinary people unwittingly live out their days in the service of computers rather than the other way around. In the late 2010s, when Tahnoon refashioned the ruins of DarkMatter into a new AI-focused company, he decided to honour Adams by calling it Group 42, or G42 for short.

G42 is the culmination of Tahnoon’s dual identity as a financier and spymaster, and the scale of its aspirations is staggering. Like many other tech giants, it aims to reconceptualise AI as a foundational form of infrastructure like water or electricity – a concept known as the “intelligence grid”. Unlike its Silicon Valley peers, however, G42’s intelligence grid has grown out of an actual nation state’s intelligence apparatus. The company’s marketing heavily emphasises its security capabilities, promising “real-time threat defence” for governments and businesses, and predictive tools that encompass “suspect profiling”, “relationship mapping” and “behavioural analysis”.

The tech industry is not short on exaggeration and bombast. Compared with many of his Silicon Valley peers, however, Tahnoon – a true AI believer who claims to have designed the entirety of one of his homes via ChatGPT – is in a unique position to deliver. G42 built on the espionage talents behind Project Raven and DarkMatter: Peng Xiao, who was the head of a key DarkMatter unit, is now G42’s CEO; Karim Sabbagh, DarkMatter’s former boss, currently runs one of G42’s main subsidiaries. One of G42’s first public products was a popular messaging app called ToTok, which was later revealed by the New York Times to be a piece of spyware, designed to “track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones”.

In a statement to the Guardian, G42 denied that the company’s origins lay in cyber-espionage operations, or that it conducts or enables unlawful surveillance. “G42 was established as an AI and technology company focused on cloud and AI infrastructure,” the firm said. “Our businesses operate under applicable laws, contractual data protections, and rigorous security and compliance frameworks.”

If US tech giants are wary of G42’s links to cyberhacking, they are doing a good job of hiding it. Microsoft has invested $1.5bn in the company and its vice-chair, Brad Smith, now has a seat on G42’s board of directors. G42 and its specialist AI investment fund – also chaired by Tahnoon – are either direct investors in or major partners of Anthropic, xAI and OpenAI. Sam Altman, the latter’s CEO, calls Tahnoon “a dear personal friend”. Microsoft and OpenAI were approached for comment on this article, but neither company provided a response. In its statement to the Guardian, G42 noted that its partnership with Microsoft “is governed by a binding agreement developed in consultation with the US and UAE governments, covering cybersecurity, data protection, responsible AI, export controls and business integrity”.

Tahnoon’s appeal to Silicon Valley is obvious. After all, if you’re going to go into business with a cash-laden Gulf autocrat, then picking one who presides over a heavily digitised state-security empire – and who boasts a proven track record of hoovering up humongous amounts of personal data, the raw ingredient upon which your technology depends – feels like a logical choice. Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Elon Musk may all be hugely influential AI leaders, but none of them simultaneously runs the CIA.

Another powerful figure to have clutched Tahnoon and G42 close to his bosom is Donald Trump, who has hosted lavish state banquets for the sheikh at the White House and posed for photos with him in the Oval Office. The American security services have long harboured fears about Emirati influence on US politics: in 2022 the National Intelligence Council produced a confidential report for Washington policymakers warning of Abu Dhabi’s “illegal and legal attempts to steer US foreign policy”. Joe Biden’s administration restricted the export of AI chips to the UAE because of concerns over the country’s close ties to China. But last year Trump reversed that decision, authorising the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Silicon Valley’s most advanced chips to the Al Nahyan regime. Many of them will go straight to G42.

The deal was announced only two weeks after one of Tahnoon’s investment vehicles acquired $2bn-worth of cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty, a company owned by the Trump family, who earn interest on all its reserves. Tahnoon is also a direct investor in World Liberty, having purchased 49% of the firm less than a month before Trump’s second inauguration. Both the White House and World Liberty have denied any connection between Tahnoon’s investments and the chip transfer. A spokesperson for G42 told the New York Times that the company was “grounded in integrity”.

“Corruption, plain and simple,” is how the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren describes the murky entanglement of Tahnoon’s money and the US White House. But the rapid ascent of Tahnoon and G42 within the AI industry reflects a sincerely held conviction on the part of both the Trump administration and the bani Fatima that AI is set to replace oil as the elemental global commodity – and ultimate determinant of global power – and that now is the time to master it.

The result is that G42, under Tahnoon’s control, has successfully positioned itself at the heart of global AI infrastructure for decades to come. The “AI campus” currently being constructed on the UAE’s coastline is projected to have a 5GW power capacity, up to 250 times the size of the largest hyperscale datacentres today. G42 is helping to finance a $500bn rollout of new datacentres within the US, and has now acquired several of the construction companies involved. Last year, Microsoft and G42 officially co-launched the Responsible AI Future Foundation, designed to shape “ethical development and deployment of AI systems”. It is headquartered – of course – in Abu Dhabi.

Does it matter if significant chunks of our AI infrastructure sit in the hands of a man with the entire arsenal of a police state at his disposal? One person who might be able to answer that is Ahmed Mansoor, a mild-mannered Emirati electrical engineer and aspiring poet. In the early 2010s, Mansoor was among that group of public intellectuals who signed a petition calling for the creation of an elected parliament in the UAE; he also ran a website on which content critical of the Al Nahyan regime was sometimes posted. In April 2011, he was arrested on multiple charges, including the defamation of the bani Fatima, but initially released thanks to a presidential pardon.

In the years that followed, though, Mansoor was relentlessly targeted by the Emirati security services, who spent millions of dollars attempting to gain access to his electronic devices, and those of his wife. Eventually, Mansoor succumbed to a malicious email attachment, which sent all of his private data to a computer server registered to PO box 5151 in Abu Dhabi: the postal address of Sheikh Tahnoon’s personal office. He later found out that his baby monitor had also been hacked, turning it into a camera and microphone that captured every moment of his family life. He was arrested again in 2017, subjected to a secret trial, and convicted of insulting the “status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols, including its leaders”. Sentenced to 10 years in jail, he has remained in solitary confinement in al-Sadr, the maximum-security jail located about 10 miles south-west of G42’s AI mega-campus, ever since.

We don’t know if Tahnoon will use his commanding position at the heart of the AI industry to directly hack, surveil and intimidate critics, as his security services did with Mansoor. But the character of those controlling this new technology matters. Today, we don’t just use major tech platforms to store files and send messages: more and more people use AI to be their therapist, friend or even lover. Tech executives assure us that our data is safe from prying eyes but ordinary citizens have very few ways of verifying this. In its pomp, the early smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry insisted that “privacy and security form the crux of everything we do”. It failed to mention that BlackBerry was secretly working with the cybersecurity unit of a foreign government at the time, and helping it to carry out digital surveillance of mobile users. That cybersecurity unit was the UAE’s DarkMatter group, the precursor to G42.

The potential risks of untrustworthy actors controlling AI may be more insidious than direct hacking and surveillance. A group of researchers recently revealed that AI tools – including products from Meta, Google and SpaceX – are regularly altering the meaning of texts on sensitive political topics, in ways that could reshape public opinion. “I’m very worried about Tahnoon’s perception of the world,” says Al Hussein. “He’s the video-game prince who wants to press a button and eliminate all threats.”

For a glimpse of what a world reshaped in Tahnoon’s image might look like, consider the UAE. Here, political parties are nonexistent, trade unions and labour strikes prohibited, and protests and lèse-majesté met with rapid punishment. Migrant workers, who make up the vast majority of the country’s residents, are kept in a state of legalised insecurity and suffer from thousands of officially unexplained deaths each year, which human rights organisations attribute to heat stress, construction accidents and other poor working conditions. Businesses, by contrast, can pick and choose the regulations that govern them from a patchwork quilt of 40-odd “freezones”, all competing to lure investors with bespoke tax regimes and legal frameworks.

Beyond the UAE’s borders, Abu Dhabi’s dominion encompasses a vast network of ports, security partners, client regimes and financial flows spanning the Red Sea and huge swathes of north, eastern and central Africa. Often presented as a neutral entrepot, torn between rival global power blocs to the east and the west, the reality is that the UAE has always served faithfully as capital’s emirate: shielding the wealth of international elites, opening up inhospitable markets, paving the way for western investors, and – as Colin Powers, a political economist specialising in the Middle East, puts it – “energetically extending the circuitry of global wealth accumulation”.

Under the bani Fatima, this function has included the brutal suppression of any democratic experiment within the Emirati field of influence that might threaten the material interests of the Al Nahyans or their allies. In Egypt, the UAE has helped sustain the military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, which has turned its guns upon thousands of protesters. In Yemen, Libya and Ethiopia, it has armed paramilitaries and fuelled shocking levels of state violence against civilians. In Sudan, it is accused of complicity in genocide. In response, Abu Dhabi has deployed AI tools as part of a sophisticated disinformation campaign designed to discredit the United Nations. Several dissidents wanted by other dictatorships – from Iran to Saudi Arabia and Rwanda – have also been kidnapped while transiting through Dubai airport, before being “delivered” by the Emiratis to their home country’s security forces. Not all of Abu Dhabi’s foreign adventures have been successful; many have led to military quagmires and reputational damage on the world stage. But for those on the receiving end of Emirati intervention, the consequences have been dire.

The imperial ambitions of Tahnoon and his brothers do not seem to rest on direct occupation of land, but rather on controlling key “nodes” outside their borders: the sites at which the movement of money, arms, trade, technology and ideas intersect. AI, the functioning of which is distributed across territories around the world, is the ideal asset for a nodal empire. Tahnoon’s goal of making the UAE an AI superpower is framed domestically as part of his family’s historic mission to improve the lot of the Emirati people. But the UAE’s accumulation of power in recent decades has been delivered on the bani Fatima’s own terms. Central to the Al Nahyan family’s worldview is the notion that, amid a planet riven by the chaos and humiliation of democracy, their nation is a demonstration that things can and should work differently. According to Tahnoon’s brother, President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, “The UAE is a tangible model for the world.”

With his array of spy tools, superyachts and supercomputers, his preference for remaining far from public view, his habit of always wearing dark glasses in public (even indoors), and – of course – his obsession with personal longevity (he aims to live to 150), it would be easy to characterise Tahnoon as a cartoon villain. But in truth, this is not a story about a malevolent prince plotting vile deeds from his palace in the Persian Gulf. It is a far more prosaic tale about how power and money function in the world today.

In Washington, just as in Abu Dhabi, politics is increasingly governed by personal relationships and transactional gains rather than popular demands. In the UK, as in the UAE, firms such as Palantir that offer AI-enabled surveillance and data crunching are being integrated with the basic functions of the state. All over the planet, business-friendly strongmen are the order of the day. “For the last 20 years, democracy has been in decline,” said Ronald Deibert, the founder and director of The Citizen Lab. “That happens to coincide with an enormous expansion of digital surveillance capabilities for both commercial and national security purposes. The epicentre of a lot of this is the UAE. And where do all roads lead in the UAE? They lead to Sheikh Tahnoon.”

On 27 February, Tahnoon chaired a board meeting at G42’s AI investment fund. That night, the sky above Abu Dhabi’s seafront lit up with the flashes of US and Israeli missiles raining down across the Persian Gulf, marking the start of the Iran war. One of Tehran’s first acts of retaliation was to directly bomb two AI datacentres in the UAE. The Iranian government soon published an official list of what they considered “legitimate” military targets which included the Emirati offices of US technology companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Western journalists speculated that this could spell the end of Tahnoon’s AI dreams. “Why did we ever think datacentres in the Gulf were a good idea?” ran one headline in the Financial Times.

Over the following months, Tahnoon shuttled around the Middle East, conducting covert diplomacy. According to Reuters, senior officials from Iran’s revolutionary guards were hosted by Tahnoon in his Abu Dhabi guesthouse. By mid-June, he had reportedly struck an agreement that provided billions of dollars for the Iranian government, and brought Iran’s strikes on the UAE to a halt. A few weeks later, on the same day that Trump announced that the US’s ceasefire with Iran was “over”, the US commerce department quietly confirmed that it was removing the last remaining export controls restricting the sale of advanced AI chips to Abu Dhabi.

As life in Abu Dhabi gradually returned to something resembling normality, Tahnoon’s family members began reappearing in public. A company founded by his daughter, Sheikha Fatima bint Tahnoon, signed a memorandum of understanding with G42 last month, suggesting that she is being primed to follow in his footsteps and eventually assume a commanding role within the UAE’s tech-security empire. Tahnoon’s son, Sheikh Zayed bin Tahnoon, was the guest of honour at several major jiu-jitsu events this summer. Tahnoon himself, meanwhile, stayed far from the public eye. Judging when to retreat, and knowing when to strike: “Ben” had outmanoeuvred his doubters once again.

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Earl Swift was a reporter for The Virginia Pilot and has contributed to Outside. He’s been nominated for a Pulitzer eight times. Among other books, he wrote Chesapeake Requiem, a New York Times bestseller that chronicles a year in the life of Tangier Island, located 12 miles out in the middle of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. There, a dozen miles from shore, residents live a life with “one foot in the twenty-first century and another in times long passed,” he writes.

Swift spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about reporting and writing his new book, Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail. Swift hiked the 2,000-mile trail twice, 30 years apart, in order to write the book. He talks with O’Meara about story structure, getting close to the truth, and why it’s important to remove the speedbumps that might cause a reader to abandon your story before the end. 

This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow. 

—Krista Stevens

Brendan: Much has been written about the Appalachian Trail, and you’ve brought a different kind of sensibility to it. How do you make your book fresh and immediate and yet able to sit alongside all the other titles about the trail?

Earl: I’m lucky, in the sense that probably the two best books about trail hikes were written by people who didn’t finish them. Bill Bryson was one and Cheryl Strayed was the other. Most trail accounts are self-published and unedited, written by folks with relatively little writing experience. Not to sound highfalutin, but it shows. I also knew I had a story to tell with Molly and Jeff and what had happened there. [Ed: to say more about Molly and Jeff here would spoil the plot of Swift’s book.] I felt I was pretty well-suited to tell that story. The opportunity was to be that one rare book about a trail journey that stands apart, and I figured it was worth the risk to try to write that book.

Brendan: As you hiked south, getting into Georgia, you started to experience congestion, more people. You noticed a generational divide at Low Gap and other campsites. Younger hikers seem predisposed to tenting, no matter what. Even in the middle of a downpour, they’ll choose their individual shelter over the communal. You also noticed isolation and phones, something you wouldn’t see 30 years ago.

Earl: You didn’t see it 30 years ago because there were no phones. We forget that the smartphone didn’t come along until 2007, a full 17 years after I did that first hike. It was a very different environment back then. This was eight years before Bill Bryson wrote A Walk in the Woods. The trail did not occupy a spot in the collective consciousness. It was not part of American culture the way it has become since, and so you were dealing with people who were drawn from a much narrower band of society. There were people who were already outdoorsy, and that’s not necessarily the case now. All walks [of life] attempt a thru hike these days, but back then it tended to be people who were already part of the fraternity. If you wanted to make a call, you hitchhiked to the nearest town and went to a payphone. There was no other option. If you wanted a pizza, you had to hitch into town. Now you have people who will get on their phones when they’re two miles from the nearest road crossing, and they’ll arrange for a pizza joint to deliver a pie at the road crossing when they arrive, which would have been science fiction. 

Brendan: There’s a balance in what to include, so that it doesn’t feel repetitive. You need to pick high intensity moments, be it the physical experience of a gnarly section of trail, or the three siblings from Kentucky who are assholes with no etiquette. You pick these moments so it’s not front-loaded or middle-loaded or back-loaded. There is a delicacy in how you deploy various elements throughout.

Earl: For any storyteller, proportionality is the key ingredient. You must figure out how much of each piece you share with the reader. If there’s one fatal flaw in most trail chronicles, it’s that writers don’t make enough of a distinction between telling moments and untelling moments. They just throw everything at you, and it gets boring. 

There are relatively few classic books about the Appalachian Trail, but one of them came in the late ’70s. It’s this two-volume, 1,000-page book called Hiking the Appalachian Trail. It gives you first-person accounts of the first 50 or so thru hikes. By 100 pages into the first volume, you’ve gone numb because every story is exactly the same. Part of the problem is that the whole tenor of the story is This happened, and then this happened. There’s never a moment’s pause to reflect on what it means and why I should care as a reader. Everything’s treated as equally important, and therefore nothing is important.

Brendan: You’re the tour guide and you’re going to point to what matters. That degree of authorial authority is integral to any narrative, especially something like this, because otherwise it would just be so rote and boring. You have to imbue it with a pulse.

Earl: Job one, for anybody writing a book—for anybody writing a story of any kind, of any length—is to get the reader to that last word. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter which pretty words you drop in the middle of the story. It doesn’t matter how brilliantly conceived it is. The story has failed because you have failed to get the reader to the end, to the finish line. 

The whole process of structuring a story, and strategizing about a story comes down to, How do I remove all the speed bumps that will encourage the reader to set this aside? If you can do that effectively, then you win, you get the reader to finish the story. The reader can badmouth the story after the fact. If the reader’s reached the end, you as the writer have achieved what you set out to do. All you can ask is for them to finish the story. You can’t ask them to like it. That’s up to them. But you can get them to finish it if you do it right.

We make decisions about what we include and what we leave out. We decide where we start a story, which is not always at the beginning. We decide where we’re going to end it, which is not always at the ending. You hope that in making those decisions, you get the reader to the truth, or pretty damn close to it, as close as you can, given the facts that you’re working with. But it is a construct, and it is your responsibility. Structure your story in such a way that the story will achieve what it sets out to do. That it will succeed in terms of incorporating enough propulsion to get the reader to the end. 

I probably spent three months doing nothing but cutting. Most of the writing of this book was cutting. I wrote a journal while I was hiking, and then I did nothing but cut when it came to writing the book. 

Brendan: In what ways did the hike change you?

Earl: In 1990, the big takeaway for me was that I could do anything. It boosted my confidence to the point where I’m sure I was pretty obnoxious in the months immediately after. God knows I must have been difficult to deal with. I could do anything! It made me Superman. Part of that was seeing something demonstrated daily that my dad had been saying to me for years. He was always big on saying, “How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time.” It had just been “dad talk” to me until this hike, when I realized part of being able to do anything is knowing how to bust it up into its components, and then bust those components up into their individual ingredients. How to take each little bite-sized fragment in sequence, and pretty soon you’ve accomplished the whole thing. 

That dictated my approach to big assignments at the paper and in magazines, and certainly it has informed every book effort. It’s a stupid amount of work to write a book. I wouldn’t recommend this line of work to anybody. It’s a ridiculous way to try to make a living. So uncertain, so filled with terror, and so potentially without reward of any kind. But breaking the 2,200 miles into daily doses of 14 to 17 miles describes perfectly how I go about writing a book now. You don’t sit down to write 105,000 words. You sit down to write 1,200 words a day. That’s my daily quota. Do that over enough days, and pretty soon you have the 105,000 words.

Brendan: How did you settle on 1,200?

Earl: Early on, with my first couple of books, it was 2,000, and I just whacked it down. My first hike, I had no trouble banging out 17 to 20 miles a day. Now, 14 miles feels like a pretty tough day at the office, a long day. 

It’s the same with writing. Twelve hundred words takes as much out of me now as 2,000 used to. I’ll probably drop it down to 1,100, maybe even 1,000 with the next book. I’d like to think that the words are better than they used to be. I still find that I spend the first hour or two every morning, in the middle of a book project, going back through what I thought were perfect words laid down the day before. Invariably, when I wake up, I find that they weren’t so perfect after all. In fact, they need a lot of fixing and so I do repair for the first couple of hours, and then try to make something out of the rest of the day with new stuff. 

Listen to the full conversation below.

Just a few years ago, Jos Leijdekkers was a gangster in Antwerp, working for a major drug lord. Today he’s the most powerful man in Sierra Leone, which he’s single-handedly turned into a crucial port in the transatlantic cocaine trade. European authorities haven’t been able to track him down. Can a journalist? Alexander Clapp details Leijdekkers’s remarkable, violent rise to power, while looking for the man himself:

“These kinds of people, we are always seeing them in Africa. They come, they disappear. But the moment we learned who he was, it freaked me out,” a local car-dealer who was one of the first people to sell a motor to Leijdekkers, told me. “I left Sierra Leone after finding out. I became really scared. Not small scared.” Sophie van Leeuwen, a Dutch correspondent for RTL News, told me she “had the strong feeling I was being followed by the secret police” during the first days of a reporting trip she took to Sierra Leone in February 2025. She was arrested outside a villa where Leijdekkers was believed to reside, informed that she had intruded upon a “special security situation”, and questioned for 15 hours. Her camera and computer were searched and scrubbed. The Flemish owner of her hotel was interrogated over her alleged role in seeding a European spy network in Sierra Leone.

One evening in the hills above Freetown I attended a cocktail party where Western diplomats mingled with aid-workers. “Careful with that,” a European mission head told me when I mentioned why I had come to Africa, swivelling her blue eyes round the room. A Norwegian mining investor assured me that there would only be one way of knowing whether I was making progress in my investigation: “The government will arrange a car crash for you.”

In our relentlessly optimized world, Justin Neuman calls for more nothing. More time for both adults and kids to engage in free, unstructured play. More opportunities to play games without competition or scoring. More chances to do things without needing to produce outputs or achieve goals. More “transitional spaces” through which we can practice, imagine, and think.

For years, I’ve commuted on foot from Grand Central Station to 14th Street, 30 blocks, give or take. I told myself it was exercise, or that I was saving the subway fare, or that I liked the air. But the truth is I was thinking. Or rather, I was letting thinking happen. The lecture I couldn’t outline at my desk would assemble itself somewhere around 34th Street, the important points falling into sequence with my footfalls, the argument clarifying as if the motion itself were doing the editing. I wasn’t working on the lecture. I was walking in it, the way my kids were playing in Catan.

Test captain Babar Azam fell five places to 15th in the Test batting rankings.

The post Pakistan’s Test ranking woes continue after Lord’s defeat appeared first on BOL News.

The king was admitted to Oslo University Hospital on August 17 with hemolytic anemia.

The post King Harald V battling blood disorder and infection in Oslo Hospital appeared first on BOL News.

For The New Yorker, Shayla Love writes about how GPS—a military technology turned daily necessity, and the subject of Katherine Dunn’s new book, Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World—has changed the way we move through the world. To test her own skills, Love navigates from North Brooklyn to a park in Queens with a paper map, then sets off on an orienteering course without the trusty little blue dot, where she discovers how rusty her sense of direction really is.

Surprisingly, I still felt an urge to pull out my phone and look at my dot, to confirm what my surroundings were showing me. I started to feel that the true value of orienteering was more akin to that of reading a long book, or baking from scratch, or attending a long classical-music concert. I wasn’t necessarily tapping into my inner homing pigeon. I was practicing more general skills that get rusty when I over-rely on technology: paying attention, being patient, accepting uncertainty. We made our way to No. 7, on a “prominent tree, east side.” We didn’t find No. 6—a small blow to the ego—but my confidence soared when we found five, four, and three. The desire to check my dot faded to a low simmer.

Ahead of the 40th anniversary of Stand By Me, Alec Joyner takes up Rob Reiner’s classic film and considers it from a few dozen angles. It’s a canny piece of critical writing on time, memory, masculinity, and tenderness, forces that often work against each other. (Joyner doesn’t raise the subject of Reiner’s violent death last year, though he pauses briefly on Chris, a character “freakishly knifed to death . . . trying to break up a fight.”) Stand By Me‘s two days of summer are a “vital pause” in the life of its characters, a “portal . . . into the expanse of time.” Here, Joyner illuminates that pause, and captures some of its elusive grace.

Stand by Me was slapped with an R rating, for the boys’ profanity, as well as the prominence of child abuse and death. This may have hampered ticket sales, but it also made it the first R-rated movie that many ’80s and ’90s kids saw. It made it a fitting rite of passage.

Still, there’s something lamentable in the verdict, the MPAA telling a faulty story much like the fictional adults of Castle Rock. How many blockbusters have promoted horrendous violence, only to make the PG-13 grade because they feel safely unreal? Stand by Me was received as dangerous because its horrors and its dirt live at home.

Forced disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades. In 2019, something remarkable happened: Twenty-one disappeared people were found, alive. They had been toiling in narco-slavery camps, an under-covered aspect of Mexico’s illicit drug trade. But there wasn’t a happy ending. (This story was originally published in Spanish by Quinto Elemento Lab):

Freedom had not been kind to the captives. Few had been able to regain even the wretched standard of living that had pushed them into the arms of the cartels in the first place. Many were scarred by paranoia, trapped in addiction or suffering mental illnesses. Some had been abandoned by their partners or families. More than one, we learned, died after being rescued, some by their own hand. We came to feel that these men had been triply betrayed: first by the narcos who had lured them into the mountains, then by the government that failed to look for them, and finally by a society that refused to welcome them back into its fold.

We are telling their stories not because we hope to secure justice, but simply to establish the truth. This was a modest ambition shared by one of our interlocutors, Andrés. He told us that many of the survivors’ accounts had been doubted. He’d even read criticisms on social media: That’s what they deserve for being shiftless and lazy. “Those people should try thinking before they speak, because they don’t know when they might suddenly find themselves in a similar situation,” Andrés said. “They might be lucky enough to be rescued, or unlucky enough to die out there. I decided to give this interview because this situation’s not going to change. In Mexico, there’s sexual slavery, human trafficking, forced labour. This didn’t start yesterday; it’s been going on for many years.” 

By the time I encountered the fifth photo in Matt Seaton’s contemplative essay about New England’s stone walls, I found myself participating in the image, trying to figure out the maneuvers that had made the structure cohere. That’s a lot of the gratification here—”striving for coherence,” as Seaton, a former Atlantic editor, describes the work of walling. This is a quick read, and Seaton makes every word count, fitting a bit of Robert Frost and a lot of rock knowledge together just like he was building a . . . well, you know.

Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.