Source: Global Voices — International Relations · By Daria Dergacheva
Republished with attribution from Global Voices — International Relations. Text reformatted for readability; original reporting belongs to the credited author.
The main danger of AI in authoritarian regimes is the ability to suppress any protest
Moscow subway cameras are connected to a facial recognition system. Screenshot taken from the YouTube video “Facial recognition cameras help detain dissidents in the Moscow metro” by the DW YouTube channel ; fair use.
Sonya, from Stavropol Krai, Russia, is 15 years old. In June 2026, she was sentenced to 70 hours of compulsory labor, connected to a February 2026 incident in which she had written the surname “Navalny” on a bus stop . That stop happened to be in a district that was being monitored by officers from the Center for Combating Extremism , commonly called Center E. Similarly, Yuri, a pensioner from Astrakhan who was also identified from surveillance footage, was given three years of restricted freedom for writing “No to War” in red marker on buildings.
Authoritarian regimes are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology of political survival. Cameras with facial recognition, video analytics, biometric databases, digital IDs, social media monitoring, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) systems, and public service platforms are gradually merging into a single infrastructure of control.
Such a system makes it possible not only to observe citizens in real time, but also to reconstruct their past movements, connections, habits, communications, and political activity. The main risk is that AI and related technologies make repression faster and less visible: the state no longer needs to constantly demonstrate force if citizens know they can be identified retroactively.
Modern digital authoritarianism is not developing in isolation, but through the international exchange of technologies, standards, and practices. China , Russia , Iran, Belarus, Venezuela, countries in Africa, Western and Central Asia, and companies connected to them, sell and exchange AI infrastructure tools that are being used for the purpose of repression. Western technologies a re also being bought and exchanged within authoritarian regimes.
In early June 2026, Sberbank Deputy Chairman Alexander Vedyakhin told Reuters that the company was offering countries in the Global South access to Russian AI models that would take “local values” into account. Vedyakhin was referring to specific large language models (LLMs) — GigaChat and YandexGPT — which Russia had been trying to develop since 2019.
However, as IT expert Alexander Isavnin told journalists at the podcast Zhivoy Gvozd, Russian generative AI models lag behind American and Chinese models and cannot even generate text in Cyrillic . Yet, new national and sovereign AI models are supposed to reflect traditional values, including patriotism , service to the Fatherland and responsibility for its fate, a strong family, historical memory and continuity between generations, and unity of the peoples of Russia. These models are expected to be trained on domestic, authentically Russian material.
It is reasonable to assume that in countries like those in Western Asia, Russian AI models will reflect adherence to Islamic traditions, while in Argentina, perhaps, they will reflect respect for football from an early age. Developers, meanwhile, do not understand how people with no idea about how any of this works can write AI laws: “In places, the document reads as if it was written by people who had only ever seen LLMs in local news.” From the perspective of global democracy, however, this illiteracy among Russian lawmakers suggests that Russia is unlikely to supply LLMs to autocracies around the world.
China, by contrast — unlike American developers — makes its language models open in principle, meaning that anyone can take the code and modify it for their own needs. In China, all LLMs are controlled and tightly regulated by the state, so party censorship is written into the code from the start — for example, you cannot get an answer about the Tiananmen Square protests. However, the models are distributed as open source, which is why more than 50 percent of Chinese model users come from developers, including those in the Global South.
At the same time, the U.S.-based ChatGPT can easily replicate AI-generated Iranian propaganda videos, in which the main characters are Lego figures. Only once, a France 24 investigation showed, did the chatbot alert the journalist that he might be inadvertently reproducing propaganda, but desisted when he said it was only satire.
AI also includes other tech developments, like the so-called “smart city” systems which, in the Chinese version, imply comprehensive surveillance of a state’s own citizens. This can include video surveillance, wiretapping, internet censorship, facial recognition systems, ethnic profiling, and so on. In supplying such systems to the Global South, China has overtaken Russia.
Yet, Russia is not lagging behind in the use of AI to surveil its own citizens. State media write that Moscow has long moved beyond the threshold implied by the concept of a “smart city.” Today, it includes a complex digital urban ecosystem made up of video surveillance, AI, big data, and the “internet of things.”
According to estimates by Comparitech , two of the ten cities outside China with the highest number of cameras per person are Russian: Moscow and St. Petersburg. The list also includes four Indian cities, Seoul in South Korea, Baghdad in Iraq, Kabul in Afghanistan, and Singapore. In China itself, the number of cameras has practically reached a ratio of one camera for every two people: the largest mass-surveillance system in the world.
Russia has sold , and in some cases, continues to supply its surveillance software products to other authoritarian states, while remaining technologically dependent on China. In 2024, up to 80 percent of all cameras used in Russia were made in China and sold under Russian brands.
China has built one of the most sophisticated domestic systems of digital control; it has also turned the export of digital infrastructure into part of its foreign policy via the Digital Silk Road , launched back in 2017. Through the initiative, China promotes digital infrastructure, technological cooperation, standards, and solutions for countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Formally, these projects are described as support for the digital transformation of developing states, but they deepen partners’ dependence on Chinese technologies and create channels for the spread of AI systems, especially mass-surveillance technologies.
Experts from the Carnegie Endowment , the European Parliament , and Freedom House agree that the main danger of AI in authoritarian regimes is the ability to suppress any protest before it has even properly materialized. AI systems can help authorities detect early signals: unusual online activity, preparations, movement patterns, and links between activists.
For images and additional context, see the original article.
Original publication: 2026-10-15
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