Legal Literacy, AI Risk Perception, and Digital Safety in UAE Universities: Testing a Trust-Calibrated Vigilance Model

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now woven into university communication, learning, and administration, exposing students, faculty, and professional staff to scalable cybercrime, social engineering, and personal-data risks. This study tested a Compliance Architecture–Legality–Trust–Vigilance (CALT–V) model in which legal literacy and AI-enabled risk perception act as upstream orientations, trust as a calibration mechanism, vigilance as the proximal behavioral-translation layer, and digital safety behaviors as the outcome. A cross-sectional, role-stratified, non-probability survey of 710 UAE higher-education stakeholders (300 students, 200 faculty members, and 210 administrative/professional staff) measured self-reported legal literacy, objective legal knowledge, AI risk perception, institutional and technology/AI trust, vigilance, digital safety behaviors, and perceived governance conditions. Respondents reported moderate objective legal knowledge alongside moderate-to-high self-reported literacy, risk awareness, trust, vigilance, and safety behavior. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were estimated with subscale-level indicators in IBM SPSS AMOS 29.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA), using maximum-likelihood estimation, complete scale-level cases, and 5000-sample bias-corrected bootstrapping for indirect and total effects. Because the model is multidimensional and the sample is role-balanced but non-probability, the results are read as cautious model-based evidence rather than definitive population evidence. AI risk perception was associated with digital safety behaviors both directly and indirectly through trust and vigilance, whereas trust was linked to safety mainly through vigilance. Legal literacy was associated with trust, but its total association with digital safety behavior was not statistically reliable. Rather than claiming that human oversight is a new idea, the findings specify how trust-with-verification can be operationalized in UAE university cyber-governance through concrete verification, reporting, and incident-escalation routines.