Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of Channel One’s evening newscast with a hand-drawn sign: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you!” She shouted “No to war!” until she was dragged away — a public, human act of dissent that, the source argues, is now being partially replaced by artificial faces and voices on state television.
Marina Ovsyannikova, Margarita Simonyan, and AI anchors
That replacement is no hypothetical. Margarita Simonyan, a senior RT propagandist, told an interviewer in October 2024 that “that face doesn’t exist. We generated the voice and everything else.” In a follow-up to Vedomosti she added the calculus driving the change: “These anchors don’t need a salary or insurance. They won’t get arrested, and the police won’t search their homes. It’s all wonderful and terrifying at the same time.” The scene of a live protest on state television now contrasts, in the source’s account, with a future of synthetic anchors who cannot defect or be detained — yet still require engineers to create and sustain them.
China’s smart cities and the “Zero Trust AI system”
China is presented as the leader in applying AI to monitor subordinates and automate state functions. Smart city programs in Beijing, Shanghai, and other urban centers use AI to centralize oversight and perform algorithmic performance reviews of local officials. Beijing’s “Zero Trust AI system,” deployed across roughly 30 counties and cities over the past decade, cross-referenced more than 150 government databases to catch embezzlement and nepotism — and flagged 8,700 officials before local governments, under pressure, began rolling it back. At the same time, automated e-government portals have reduced face-to-face interactions for issuing documents and permits, and China is researching “thought management” and replacing armies of paid Internet commentators with bots.
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See what we buildRussia’s camera networks, Oculus, and Meliorator
Russia’s experience illustrates similar trade-offs. The source records a citywide facial-recognition system tied to roughly 200,000 cameras that was used to identify and apprehend protesters during the 2021 antigovernment demonstrations. In 2023, the Russian Internet regulator launched Oculus, an AI system that scans hundreds of thousands of images per day for prohibited content, including political content — at an order of magnitude beyond human censors. Meanwhile, the security service’s Meliorator tool has been used to create over a thousand profiles of fictitious Americans, primarily on X (formerly Twitter), to amplify Kremlin narratives at far lower cost than human troll farms.
The indispensable engineers and Russia’s talent exodus
But machines are not self-sustaining. The essay highlights how autocrats’ reliance on AI concentrates leverage in small corps of engineers and data scientists who actually build and maintain the systems. Russia’s response when IT specialists began to flee after February 2022 illustrates the point: rather than coercion, the Kremlin offered inducements — deferments from conscription, exemptions from taxes, subsidized mortgages, and full waivers when a mobilization of 300,000 men was ordered seven months later — in order to keep tech expertise available. Those measures did not stop an outflow of roughly 100,000 specialists — about a tenth of Russia’s tech workforce in 2022 — underscoring how fragile the talent base can be. The source draws historical parallels: like Rome’s Praetorian Guard, a small, indispensable corps can both protect and threaten a ruler’s hold on power.
What this means for technologists, policymakers, and the public
- Technologists and security teams: expect concentrated responsibility for systems that decide who gets flagged, what content is suppressed, and which alerts reach decision-makers — and with that responsibility, concentrated leverage over political outcomes.
- Policymakers and regulators: can automate functions once done by humans — as the UAE’s April 2025 Regulatory Intelligence Office demonstrates, using AI to draft and amend federal laws — but will still depend on a small group of specialists; a year later the UAE prime minister said autonomous AI agents would take over half of federal operations within two years and that “the performance of ministers, directors general, and entities will be assessed based on their ability to adopt this transformation.”
- The public and the media: will confront fewer visible human intermediaries (synthetic anchors, automated permits) even as the underlying human decisions — what an algorithm flags, what a censor suppresses — remain opaque and controlled by a narrow technical elite.
The core paradox the source draws is simple and stark: AI promises autocrats cheaper surveillance, smarter censorship, and fewer untrustworthy human subordinates, but it redistributes, rather than eliminates, political risk. Systems that flag embezzlers, identify protesters, or generate anchors still need people to build, tune, and interpret them — and those people can delay alerts, degrade feeds, or shape what the ruler sees. The more a regime trusts machines to protect its rule, the more it risks empowering a new, smaller Praetorian Guard whose indispensability can be as perilous as the one it replaces.
