This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared in Foreign Affairs . Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the anchor’s head that read: “Stop the war.
Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you!” She shouted, “No to war!”
until she was dragged away. No one has protested the war on Russian television since then, partly as a result of tighter security and a general climate of fear. But in October 2024, Margarita Simonyan, one of Russia’s chief propagandists, gave another explanation.
A growing number of the RT network’s anchors, she explained to an interviewer, are not real. “That face doesn’t exist. We generated the voice and everything else.”
They were, she meant, produced by artificial intelligence. In a follow-up interview with the newspaper Vedomosti , she spelled out the logic: “These anchors don’t need a salary or insurance,” she said. “They won’t get arrested, and the police won’t search their homes.
It’s all wonderful and terrifying at the same time.” This is AI’s promise to every autocratic ruler: the ability to maintain control without delegating tasks to unreliable humans. It is an extremely attractive prospect.
No matter how powerful, dictators have always needed subordinates—censors, propagandists , security guards, police officers, intelligence analysts, and local bureaucrats—to carry out their orders. But subordinates always pose a potential threat. They could shirk, steal, lie, leak, or conspire against their boss.
As a result, one of the oldest dilemmas facing autocrats is how to empower agents to carry out orders without also enabling them to turn against their leader. Autocrats have usually managed the tradeoff by filling key positions with mediocrities whose incapacity is, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt put it, “the best guarantee of their loyalty.” But this inevitably makes it harder for dictatorships to govern and survive crises.
AI appears to offer autocrats two ways to resolve this long-standing dilemma. First, it means they can now easily monitor and discipline their followers in real time. A change in a local official’s spending habits or meeting schedules can be flagged automatically by an AI system, without any need for self-interested informants.
Second, AI can eliminate underlings altogether. By automating tasks that once required human discretion, rulers can replace unreliable intermediaries with faithful algorithms that cannot be bribed or manipulated. Officials in autocratic regimes have said as much.
AI “can definitely replace half of officials,” Russia’s Digital Development Minister, Maksut Shadaev, told a Moscow data forum in April 2025, adding, “maybe slightly more.” Yet these promises of a self-running state are illusory, because AI is never truly autonomous. Systems have to be built and maintained by a cadre of engineers and data scientists whose expertise political leaders cannot evaluate.
The ruler who turns to AI to reduce a dependence on unreliable humans may end up relying, more blindly than before, on the few AI specialists who keep the system running. And this new digital Praetorian Guard may have the same weaknesses as the old, which makes it a threat to the ruler. Eyes and Ears China is in the lead when it comes to developing AI systems that can monitor or replace subordinates.
Smart city programs in Beijing, Shanghai, and other urban centers use AI to track performance and centralize oversight of local officials who once operated in comfortable obscurity, subjecting them to an algorithmic performance review. China also developed a “Zero Trust AI system,” which it deployed across roughly 30 counties and cities over the past decade.
This system cross-referenced more than 150 government databases to catch embezzlement and nepotism by local officials. It worked a little too well, flagging 8,700 officials before local governments, under pressure from the bureaucrats it was monitoring, began rolling it back. But Beijing has not gotten rid of its new e-government portals, which use automated systems for issuing documents and permits, reducing face-to-face interactions that bred petty corruption or favoritism.
The Chinese Communist Party , meanwhile, has plowed ahead with researching what it calls “thought management,” or how to use AI to create microtargeted propaganda. China’s army of Internet commentators, once composed of paid humans, is already being replaced by bots. Russia has been pursuing the same goals with a similar fervor.
Moscow’s citywide facial recognition system, deployed across 200,000 cameras, was used to identify and apprehend protesters during the 2021 antigovernment demonstrations. The central government has started using automated data collection and aggregation to bypass regional officials who could taint the data or use it to promote their own interests. In 2023, Russia’s Internet regulator launched Oculus, an AI system that scans hundreds of thousands of images per day for prohibited content, including political content—orders of magnitude beyond what human censors could process.
The Russian security service’s Meliorator tool has been used to create over a thousand profiles of fictitious Americans, primarily on X (formerly Twitter), to spread Kremlin narratives at a fraction of the cost of human troll farms. Other autocracies are following in Beijing’s and Moscow’s footsteps. In April 2025, the United Arab Emirates created a Regulatory Intelligence Office that uses AI to draft and amend federal laws, work once done by legislative staff.
Originally published at schneier.com
