The UAE has announced that it will leave OPEC and OPEC+ effective May 1, ending a membership that began in 1967—four years before the UAE itself was founded as a country. This signals a turning point in the UAE’s role in global energy.

The government statement, published on state news agency WAM, cited a comprehensive review of the country’s production policy and capacity as the basis for the move, calling it a reflection of “the UAE’s long-term strategic and economic vision and evolving energy profile.”

The decision, it said, is rooted in national interest and a commitment to meeting what it described as the market’s “pressing needs,” a reference to global demand that the UAE believes is being underserved at a time of significant supply disruption.

The statement acknowledged the geopolitical backdrop—including an ongoing conflict with Iran that has severely restricted tanker movements through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which roughly a fifth of the world’s crude oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes.

The EIA estimates that Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain shut in 7.5 million barrels per day of crude oil production in March, and 9.1 million barrels per day in April.

However, the statement framed the exit as policy-driven rather than reactive, noting that “underlying trends point to sustained growth in global energy demand over the medium to long term.”

A Long-Running Dispute

Tuesday’s announcement was not without precedent. In 2021, the UAE refused to endorse a production agreement to extend cuts to production unless its individual quota was raised, arguing that it had invested billions to expand capacity and was being unfairly constrained by figures set in 2018. A compromise was eventually reached, but the episode exposed a fundamental tension: The UAE wants to produce more, and OPEC’s quota system was holding it back.

That ambition has only grown since. State oil company ADNOC has a stated target of 5 million barrels per day by 2027, up from current production of around 3.4 million. Under the OPEC+ deal, the country has been held to roughly 3.2 million barrels per day while sitting on capacity above 4 million, a gap that made continued membership increasingly difficult to justify.

The UAE stressed that its exit does not signal a retreat from global energy responsibility. It pledged to bring additional production to market “in a gradual and measured manner, aligned with demand and market conditions,” and reaffirmed investment plans across oil, gas, renewables, and low-carbon technologies.

The statement noted that leaving OPEC would make the nation more flexible to respond to market dynamics; OPEC sets limits on production, meaning that the world’s biggest producers can often supply and sell more oil than they actually do.

By limiting supply, the group is able to support prices. This mechanism primarily benefits producers that rely heavily on oil revenue, a description that fits Saudi Arabia far more than the UAE, whose non-oil economy now accounts for roughly 75 percent of GDP.

Market Reaction and Wider Implications

The immediate market response was sharp. Brent crude, the European benchmark, surpassed $100 per barrel for the first time since 8 April, rising to $111 as of writing.

The longer-term implications for OPEC are more consequential. The group has been under strain for months, with several members—including Iraq, Kazakhstan, and the UAE itself—having overproduced their quotas and being required to compensate. The UAE’s departure strips the group of its third-largest producer at a time when supply dynamics are already fragile.

The exit follows Qatar’s departure from the group in 2019, and comes as OPEC prepared for a meeting in Vienna on Wednesday.

“The time has come to focus our efforts on what our national interest dictates and our commitment to our investors, customers, partners and global energy markets,” the statement read.

The UAE said it values more than five decades of cooperation within OPEC and wished the organization success going forward.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Middle East.

The next gadget you put on your head could scan your brain. Neurable, a Boston-based company that embeds its noninvasive brain-scanning technology into hardware to monitor a person’s focus levels, announced on Tuesday that it is transitioning to a licensing platform model. By certifying third parties, Neurable expects its tech to be in a “flood” of consumer gadgets this year and next.

Neurable has until now focused its efforts on a pair of consumer-grade headphones—made in partnership with audio brand Master & Dynamic. It also has a contract with the US Department of Defense to see how its technology can monitor blast overpressure and potentially help diagnose mild traumatic brain injuries in soldiers. With the licensing model, we could see more of Neurable’s tech in everyday head-based wearables.

The headphones use built-in electroencephalography (EEG) sensors to monitor brain waves. That information is sent to a companion app and lets wearers know when they need a “brain break,” nudging them to take a breather before they feel burnt out to maximize productivity. The app also lets users discover their cognitive readiness for the day, their brain age, and other metrics, such as mental recovery, cognitive strain, and anxiety resilience. WIRED staff writer Emily Mullin tested the original headphones in 2024, though she found it difficult to verify the accuracy of Neurable’s algorithms.

Now, HP-owned gaming brand HyperX is releasing a gaming headset with Neurable’s technology, and it’s all about improving human performance while esports gaming. The headphones are purported to help wearers ease into the right state of mind for the best performance. Ramses Alcaide, Neurable cofounder and CEO, tells WIRED that the company has published a white paper showing improved performance among gamers using Neurable’s tech, with reduced response times in first-person shooter games and a small increase in accuracy.

The improvements may sound minor, but milliseconds are precious in the fast-paced world of esports gaming. And Alcaide says it could translate similarly to other fields: It could help a student reduce anxiety before an exam, while athletes could condition their nerves ahead of a race or game. Neurable is hardware-agnostic; Alcaide says it can be embedded in headphones, smart glasses, hats, or helmets. “There’s a whole landscape of technology that touches your head that’s yet to be embedded with our platform,” he says.

He likens it to when Fitbit made the idea of a wrist-worn heart-rate tracker popular. In the beginning, no one knew how fitness wearables would be received, but now no one blinks an eye at one on a wrist. Soon, no one will think twice about brain-scanning tech in headphones—or, at least, that’s the idea. Neurable’s tech is “invisible” in these types of gadgets.

Companies licensing Neurable’s tech can integrate it into existing hardware, Alcaide says, and will control the entire experience from product design to the software experience; these products will be advertised as “Powered by Neurable AI.” The user data still flows to Neurable’s servers for processing, but Neurable sets the data privacy protections. User identifiers are separated from the data, and while partner companies host the user-facing layer, Neurable says it keeps control of the underlying system and data handling. Neurable has previously said its business model is not to sell user data.

“Any time there’s a new transition to technology, there’s always going to be some anxiety,” Alcaide says. “We’ve been very careful when it comes to that transition. We’re protecting the data, being as ethical as possible.”

Neurable is one of many brain-computer interface (BCI) companies in the growing category. Elemind uses EEGs to improve sleep quality, and Sabi wants to turn thoughts into text. Even Apple filed a patent for EEG-sensing AirPods, though they’re not yet available.

The authors of a new strain of ransomware called Vect are drawing attention thanks to a partnership with the TeamPCP gang and an ambitious collaboration with BreachForums that has seen every registered member of the forum given free access to their platform, but according to malware analysts, its bluster is masking a dangerous secret.

Analysts at Check Point Research (CPR) have been digging into Vect, which surfaced towards the end of 2025, and say they have now found a serious encryption flaw in the locker – which ultimately causes it to act not as an encryptor, but as a data wiper.

Traditionally, the whole point of ransomware is that classically, its effects are reversible. A cyber criminal encrypts and locks the victim’s files and in theory, hands over the decryption key once they are paid off. In the real world this does not always happen, which is why all major authorities on ransomware concur that ideally, victims should never pay.

Howeve, Vect blows the ransomware ‘business model’ to smithereens. The CPR team found that when Vect encounters a file of over 128KB in size – which in an enterprise context means most files including virtual machine images, databases, backups and archives – it not only encrypts them but permanently discards the information needed to reverse the process.

This means that even if the cyber criminals are paid, they cannot hand over a working decryptor – not through malice but because it isn’t possible to do so.

“Vect is being marketed as ransomware, but for any file over 128KB, which is most of what enterprises actually care about, it functions as a data destruction tool,” said Eli Smadja, general manager at CPR.

“CISOs need to understand that in a Vect incident, paying is not a recovery strategy. There is no decryptor that can be handed over, not because the attackers are unwilling, but because the information required to build one was destroyed the moment their software ran. The focus has to be on resilience: offline backups, tested recovery procedures, and rapid containment, not negotiation.”

The flaw has been present since before the public 2.0 release of Vect and as of the time of writing, does not seem to have been fixed. It affects all three versions targeting ESXi, Linux and Windows, said CPR