United Arab Emirates
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
The UAE presents medium-high risk for web crawling. The Cybercrime Law (Federal Decree-Law 34/2021) broadly criminalises unauthorised access to websites, information systems, and networks, with fines from AED 100,000 and imprisonment; its application to automated public-page scraping is untested but the broad drafting creates meaningful exposure. The Personal Data Protection Law (Federal Decree-Law 45/2021, in force 2 January 2022) has Executive Regulations (Cabinet Resolution 83/2022, also in force 2022); the UAE Data Office is the enforcement authority but its enforcement machinery is still maturing as of early 2026. There is no meaningful publicly-available-data exemption under the PDPL. UAE copyright law (Federal Decree-Law 38/2021) protects databases under a compilation-originality standard (no EU-style sui generis right); there is no TDM exception. No scraping-specific case law exists in English. The DIFC (Law 5/2020) and ADGM (Regulations 2021) are separate GDPR-aligned regimes governing their own free zones and are outside the PDPL's scope.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | broad criminal |
| Public-page carve-out | no |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | notice dependent |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | closed list |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | prohibited |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | none |
| robots.txt legal weight | non binding notice |
| AI training-specific law | none |
| Privacy regime | UAE PDPL (Federal Decree-Law 45/2021, Cabinet Resolution 83/2022); DIFC Law 5/2020 and ADGM Regulations 2021 apply in respective free zones |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-24. Confidence: medium. Fast-moving area — verify before relying. Not legal advice.