News

Dubai Starts Driverless Taxi Operations With Apollo Go

Live-road robotaxi testing has begun ahead of a 2026 public launch, with Baidu setting up its first overseas control hub in Dubai.

Published

9 months ago

February 9, 2026

Nour Nasir

dubai starts driverless taxi operations with apollo go

Dubai Media Office

Dubai has put its first driverless taxis into official operation, moving the project from trials to live traffic mode as the city prepares a public launch in the first quarter of 2026.

The program is run by the Roads and Transport Authority with China’s Baidu Apollo Go, the robotaxi arm of Baidu. The fleet uses the RT6, the company’s sixth-generation autonomous vehicle, built for large-scale commercial service rather than limited pilots.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum marked the start with a ride to the World Governments Summit at Madinat Jumeirah, a public show of support for the emirate’s autonomous transport push.

According to the RTA, the cars are already operating on roads open to regular traffic. The system “ensures safe and seamless mobility within a real urban environment and on roads open to live traffic,” the authority explained.

Each vehicle carries more than 40 sensors, including LiDAR, radar and camera arrays, feeding an AI stack that handles perception and driving decisions in real time. The software is tied to high-definition maps and deep-learning models designed to cope with intersections, pedestrians and dense city traffic while staying compliant within local highway laws.

Apollo Go has plenty of experience in this sector: Its vehicles have logged more than 150 million kilometers of safe driving and completed over 10 million autonomous trips across several cities, which Dubai hopes to tap into as it shifts from testing to day-to-day service.

The partnership has moved quickly. Discussions at last year’s summit led to an MoU, then road trials, then formal operations in roughly ten months — which is unusually fast for regulated transport.

Also Read: The Petshop Launches UAE’s First Pet Care Super App

Apollo Go has also opened its first operations and control center outside China at Dubai Science Park. The 2,000-square-metre site houses fleet monitoring, simulation and training rooms, plus maintenance and inspection bays. It manages daily performance, software updates and safety checks.

The company plans to grow the Dubai fleet to more than 1,000 vehicles over the next few years.

For the RTA, the bet is straightforward: make autonomous taxis a normal part of public transport, not a demo. If the 2026 launch goes according to plan, Dubai would rank among the first cities outside China running robotaxis at a meaningful commercial scale, and a regional test ground for driverless mobility.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

Also Read: Dubai Says Its Deepfake Detector Needs Just 7 Seconds Of Video

“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.