OpenAI’s Sam Altman had two suggestions for the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Al Olama at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday.

Altman said that the UAE could be the world’s regulatory sandbox to experiment with AI technologies and the country is well placed to lead the formation of a global AI watchdog.

“It’s very hard to get all the regulatory ideas right in a vacuum,” Altman said while appearing via video, adding that allowing experimentation and running scenarios would make for better laws governing the fast-evolving technology.

The ChatGPT creator repeated a recommendation that both he and Al Olama have made in the past: that there should be an oversight body like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to address open existential questions. “What happens with the most powerful of these systems?” Altman said. “What sort of auditing, safety measures do we want in place before we deploy a super-intelligence?”

The conversation onstage comes as Altman looks to raise trillions of dollars to amass the semiconductors needed to power advanced AI, and is reportedly courting the UAE as an investor.

The UAE has made AI leadership, with Abu Dhabi-backed G42 at the forefront, the foundation of its economic transformation aims. As a result, the country has become a crossroads for some of the biggest players in AI.

Later this week Nvidia, in partnership with Microsoft, will host an event for generative AI content creators in Abu Dhabi. Founder Jensen Huang appeared at WGS on Monday.