Every time I tell a ministry in the UAE or Saudi Arabia that its AI vendor is not accountable for what the institution decides, someone reaches for the contract.
There is an indemnity, they tell me. We transferred the risk. That is what we paid for.
Then the room turns to procurement, because reading clauses is what procurement does.
My position is that a better clause does not fix this. There is almost no mechanism to hold a vendor accountable for an institutional decision, and the fine print is the smaller half of the reason.
What the clause actually moves
Procurement reads clauses for a living, and the clauses are usually well drafted. An indemnity allocates cost. A warranty allocates rectification. A limitation of liability caps exposure. All of it is real, and all of it is about money.
Not one of those provisions names a person inside your institution.
That distinction sounds academic until a decision is contested. When a regulator, a minister, a board, or a citizen asks why a system reached the outcome it reached, the question is not who pays. The question is who decided. A contract moves money. It does not move the answer.
Institutions occasionally attempt the other route, which is to argue that the system itself is the responsible party. In 2024 Air Canada did exactly that at a Canadian tribunal, after its chatbot gave a customer wrong information about bereavement fares. The airline argued that the chatbot was a separate legal entity, responsible for its own actions. The tribunal described the submission as remarkable and ruled against the airline, on the basis that the chatbot was part of the company's own website.
That case is often read as a story about chatbots. It is better read as a story about deployment. The airline built it, put it in front of customers, and owned what it said. Nothing about that logic is specific to airlines, to Canada, or to 2024.
The harder problem
The contract question is solvable in principle. An institution could, with enough leverage and enough patience, negotiate terms that force a supplier to stand behind specific outputs.
The second problem is not solvable by negotiation at all, because of how these systems are now assembled.
Your institution licenses an AI assistant. That assistant does not contain a model. It routes to one, and often to several, depending on the task, the load, the cost, and the vendor's own commercial arrangements. Those arrangements change. The model that answered a question in March may not be the model answering it in September, and nobody is required to tell you when that changes.
Now a decision goes wrong. A candidate is screened out. A claim is denied. A student is flagged. Someone in your institution has to explain what happened.
Who do you hold it against. The assistant you paid for, which will point to the model. The model provider, which will point to its terms of use and to the fact that it never saw your deployment context. Or the organisation that trained the underlying model, with which you have no contractual relationship whatsoever.
That chain does not resolve inside a working week. In Saudi Arabia, it has to.
What the regulator is actually asking
SDAIA gives an institution five days to respond once it serves notice of an alleged violation. Proceedings run through an electronic platform, and failures to respond within the prescribed period are recorded.
The detail that matters most is upstream of the deadline. Access to the statement of claim is not automatic. An authorised representative of the institution has to be identified, and proof of that authority has to be submitted and approved before the institution can even read the case against it. Legal analyses of the process advise organisations to identify that representative and prepare the authority in advance, precisely because doing it under a five day clock is not realistic.
Read that sequence carefully. The regulator has made naming a person a precondition of participating in its own process. Not a governance principle, not a maturity model. A procedural requirement with a deadline attached.
Bahrain's data protection authority runs a comparable structure, giving a controller seven working days to answer once a complaint has been accepted and notified.
In the UAE, ensuring compliance across federal entities now sits inside the mandate of the Artificial Intelligence and Data Authority, the single national body for data, artificial intelligence and digital government, reporting directly to Cabinet.
The DIFC went further, and earlier. Since 2023 its data protection regulations have required a deployer or operator to appoint a named Autonomous Systems Officer before commercially running an autonomous system for high risk processing. The DIFC is a financial free zone, and its rules do not govern a federal ministry or a public university. But it establishes something useful: a regulator in this region has already decided that a named individual is a condition of operation rather than a matter of good practice.
Accountability debt
The distance between what an institution has deployed and what it can answer for is accountability debt. It compounds quietly, because nothing tests it until something is contested.
Most institutions I work with are carrying it without knowing the size of it. The policy exists. The committee meets. The vendor is reputable and the contract was reviewed. What is missing is the one thing a regulator, a minister or a court will ask for first, which is the name of the person who approved a specific deployment and answers for what it decided.
A committee cannot hold that. A department cannot hold that. A supplier will not hold it, and no clause you sign will make it do so.
Where to start
The work is not complicated, though it is uncomfortable. It begins with an inventory of what is actually running, extends to who authorised each system, and ends with a decision about who answers when each one is challenged. That last step is a leadership decision. It cannot be delegated to IT, procurement, or security, because none of those functions can assign accountability to anyone above them.
If you want to test how much of this your own institution can answer today, these are the six questions I put to leadership teams. Run them with your team, and note where the answer is a committee, a vendor, or a department.
- Which systems in your institution are using AI to make or shape decisions today?
- Who approved each of those deployments? A name, not a function.
- When one of those decisions is contested, who answers for it?
- Can that person pause or change the system, or only explain it?
- If a regulator asked how a specific decision was reached, what record would you hand over?
- Which of your vendor contracts names anyone inside your institution as accountable?
Any answer that is a committee, a vendor, or a department means the debt is already on the books.