WeRide's autonomous driving deployment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been selected as one of the Top 10 examples of international cooperation in Chinese AI technologies and products in AI From China Benefits the World (2026). The recognition was announced at the main forum of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, where China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) released the national case collection. WeRide was the only autonomous driving company included on the list, with its UAE operations recognized as a benchmark for the international deployment of Chinese AI innovation.

The company operates commercial Robotaxi services in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, with riders able to access the service through the Uber platform. WeRide is currently the only company outside the United States providing fully driverless Robotaxi services on Uber. The company's Robotaxi network covers approximately 70% of Abu Dhabi's core urban areas, with operations spanning Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah.

Operational Milestones

WeRide's achievements in the UAE are the result of years of continuous deployment and collaboration with local stakeholders. The company began public Robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in 2021, establishing a four-year first-mover advantage in the market. In 2023, WeRide became the first company to receive the UAE's national license for self-driving vehicles, authorizing autonomous vehicle testing and operation on public roads nationwide, subject to local approvals.

In December 2024, WeRide and Uber launched the largest commercial Robotaxi service outside the United States and China in Abu Dhabi. Operations expanded to Ras Al Khaimah in October 2025. In November 2025, WeRide became the first company to launch fully driverless commercial Robotaxi services in Abu Dhabi, enabled by the world's first city-level L4 autonomous driving commercial permit issued outside the United States.

Global Expansion

WeRide has developed a comprehensive global operating model spanning technology adaptation, regulatory engagement and commercial operations. Beyond the UAE, WeRide has launched public Robotaxi services in Riyadh and Singapore, while expanding into additional international markets including Madrid and Zurich. The company's autonomous driving products have a presence in more than 40 cities across 12 countries.

WeRide holds autonomous driving permits in eight countries: China, the UAE, Singapore, France, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, and the US. The company's progress in commercial deployment aligns with the UAE's long-term transportation strategy, including Dubai's goal for 25% of all transportation journeys to be autonomous by 2030.

WeRide, a global leader in autonomous driving technology, today unveiled WITT (World Intelligence Toward Truth), a Physical AI Cognitive Foundation Model designed to build AI cognition of the physical world through trusted facts extracted from real-world experience. The model introduces Atomic Physical Facts (APFs), the smallest verifiable units of information about the physical world, establishing a new fact-based cognitive framework for Physical AI. By transforming real-world operational data into trusted facts and trusted facts into learning signals, WITT aims to improve the reliability and efficiency of AI systems in complex environments.

WITT is built on four core capabilities: Fact Extraction, Fact Reasoning, Fact Verification and Fact Curation. These capabilities create a complete pipeline spanning scene understanding, event attribution, data validation and learning curation. The model identifies and extracts three categories of Atomic Physical Facts from real-world driving data: standard driving facts, multi-agent interaction facts and physically ambiguous conditions. It analyzes key events, behavioral relationships and evolving risks within a scene, while identifying underlying causes and potential trajectories.

To reduce hallucinations commonly associated with general-purpose AI models, WITT evaluates outputs across six dimensions: vulnerable road users, ego-vehicle behavior, surrounding vehicle behavior, scene understanding, comprehensive fact and traffic facilities. The model introduces factual confidence scoring and validates conclusions against external physical evidence. WITT achieves an average factual error rate approximately one-third that of leading general-purpose AI models in autonomous driving scenario understanding tasks.

In real-world operations, WITT automatically identifies high-value facts and routes them into the most effective learning workflows to maximize model improvement. Rare long-tail scenarios can be returned to WeRide GENESIS, the company’s proprietary general-purpose simulation model, for simulation training and scenario expansion. High-frequency everyday scenarios support reinforcement learning and workflow optimization, while abnormal or ambiguous data are directed into review processes to prevent valuable information from being discarded as noise.

Compared with general-purpose AI models that often rely on hundreds of billions of parameters, WITT delivers strong performance with a significantly more efficient architecture. The model reduces token costs by up to 98%, processes up to 10,000 minutes of vehicle-operation video per day on a single GPU and delivers up to 200 times greater data-processing efficiency in comparable workloads. In labeling workflows, a single request to WITT can generate more than 100 dynamic tags, enabling rapid retrieval and validation of real-world driving video.

Supported by this Physical AI flywheel, WeRide has become the world’s only company to achieve large-scale commercial deployment of both L4 autonomous driving and L2++ intelligent driving systems. In the L4 domain, WeRide has obtained autonomous driving permits across eight countries and markets, deployed autonomous driving products in more than 40 cities across 12 countries, and operates a fleet of more than 3,000 autonomous vehicles. Its Robotaxi services have achieved regular, large-scale fully driverless commercial operations in Guangzhou, Beijing, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

WITT Performance Metrics