Two weeks after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, Russian television experienced a rare and jarring breach of state control. Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, burst onto the set during a live evening newscast. Positioned directly behind the news anchor, she held up a hand-drawn sign bearing a stark message: "Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you!" She shouted anti-war slogans before being swiftly dragged away by security.
No one has dared to openly protest the war on Russian state television since that incident, a silence enforced by draconian laws, tighter security protocols, and a pervasive climate of fear. But by October 2024, Margarita Simonyan, one of the Kremlin’s chief propagandists, offered an entirely different explanation for the absolute compliance on screen. During a televised interview, she revealed that a growing number of anchors across the RT network were not real people at all. "That face doesn’t exist," she explained, noting that the network had generated the voices and appearances entirely through artificial intelligence. In a follow-up interview with the business newspaper Vedomosti, Simonyan spelled out the practical logic behind the digital transformation: "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."
This chilling revelation encapsulates the ultimate promise that artificial intelligence extends to autocratic rulers across the globe: the unprecedented ability to maintain ironclad political control without having to delegate vital tasks to unreliable, self-interested humans. For dictators throughout history, this has long been an extraordinarily attractive prospect. No matter how absolute their power, autocrats have always depended on subordinates—including censors, propagandists, security guards, police officers, intelligence analysts, and local bureaucrats—to execute their orders and sustain their regimes.
Yet, human subordinates inherently pose a continuous, underlying threat. They can shirk their duties, steal state resources, leak state secrets, lie to their superiors, or conspire behind closed doors to overthrow the boss. Consequently, one of the oldest structural dilemmas facing authoritarian rulers is how to empower human agents to carry out administrative and repressive orders without simultaneously enabling them to turn against the leader. Autocrats have traditionally managed this delicate tradeoff by filling critical government positions with mediocrities whose professional incapacity is, as political theorist Hannah Arendt famously observed, "the best guarantee of their loyalty." However, this calculated strategy inevitably compromises the efficiency of the state, making it far more difficult for dictatorships to govern effectively or survive acute domestic and international crises.
Artificial intelligence now appears to offer modern autocrats a sophisticated way to resolve this centuries-old dilemma through two distinct mechanisms. First, it enables rulers to continuously monitor and discipline their followers in real time. Subtle shifts in a local official’s spending habits, lifestyle changes, or unexplained deviations in meeting schedules can be flagged automatically by an advanced AI system, entirely eliminating the need to rely on self-interested human informants. Second, AI holds the potential to eliminate human underlings altogether. By automating administrative and oversight tasks that once required human discretion, authoritarian leaders can replace unpredictable intermediaries with faithful algorithms that cannot be bribed, manipulated, or emotionally swayed.
High-ranking officials within autocratic regimes have increasingly acknowledged this structural shift. Artificial intelligence "can definitely replace half of officials," Maksut Shadaev, Russia’s Digital Development Minister, told an audience at a Moscow data forum in April 2025, before adding cryptically that it could "maybe slightly more."
Despite these bold projections, the vision of a completely self-running, automated state remains largely illusory, primarily because artificial intelligence systems are never truly autonomous. Advanced software must still be built, calibrated, and continuously maintained by an elite cadre of human engineers and data scientists whose specialized technical expertise political leaders are fundamentally incapable of evaluating. The autocrat who turns to artificial intelligence to reduce their reliance on unreliable humans may ultimately end up depending, far more blindly than before, on the tiny fraction of tech specialists who keep the digital infrastructure operational. This newly empowered digital Praetorian Guard may ultimately harbor the very same vulnerabilities and political ambitions as the old human elites, transforming them into a profound, latent threat to the ruler.
Eyes and Ears
Globally, China has established a commanding lead in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems designed to monitor, evaluate, and replace human subordinates. Comprehensive smart city programs implemented in urban centers such as Beijing and Shanghai utilize AI to track performance metrics and centralize administrative oversight over local officials who once operated in comfortable obscurity, subjecting them to unyielding algorithmic performance reviews.
Over the past decade, China also developed and deployed a "Zero Trust AI system" across approximately 30 counties and cities. This aggressive system cross-referenced more than 150 disparate government databases in an effort to automatically detect embezzlement, corruption, and nepotism by local bureaucrats. The program arguably functioned a bit too efficiently, flagging an astonishing 8,700 officials before local governments, buckling under intense political pressure from the very bureaucrats the technology was monitoring, began scaling it back.
Even so, Beijing has maintained its commitment to e-government portals, implementing automated systems for issuing official documents and bureaucratic permits. This transition successfully reduces face-to-face interactions that historically bred petty corruption, bribery, and personal favoritism. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has aggressively pursued research into what it describes as "thought management"—exploring how artificial intelligence can be harnessed to generate microtargeted propaganda. China’s vast army of internet commentators, which was once composed of paid human workers, is already being systematically replaced by automated bots.
Russia has pursued remarkably similar strategic goals with comparable fervor. Moscow’s citywide facial recognition infrastructure, integrated across a network of 200,000 public cameras, was heavily utilized to identify and apprehend political protesters during antigovernment demonstrations. Simultaneously, the central government has increasingly relied on automated data collection and aggregation pipelines to bypass regional officials who might otherwise taint administrative data or manipulate it to promote their own personal or political interests.
In 2023, Russia’s federal internet regulator launched Oculus, an advanced AI system engineered to scan hundreds of thousands of images and video files per day for prohibited content, including unauthorized political material. This automated capacity operates at orders of magnitude beyond what human censors could ever physically process. Additionally, the Russian security service has utilized a specialized tool known as Meliorator to automatically generate over a thousand detailed profiles of fictitious American citizens, primarily on the social media platform X, to efficiently spread Kremlin geopolitical narratives at a tiny fraction of the financial cost required to run traditional human troll farms.
Other authoritarian governments are rapidly following in the footsteps of Beijing and Moscow. In April 2025, the United Arab Emirates established a specialized Regulatory Intelligence Office that leverages artificial intelligence to autonomously draft and amend federal legislation—tasks that were historically managed by legislative staff. Just a year later, UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum announced that autonomous AI agents would take over half of all federal government operations within a two-year timeframe. He explicitly noted that "the performance of ministers, directors general, and entities will be assessed based on their ability to adopt this transformation."
While these technological innovations undoubtedly reduce the total number of human bureaucrats that autocrats need to employ, they fundamentally fail to deliver what dictators desire most: a truly self-running state. Even cutting-edge, AI-generated television anchors still require skilled human technicians to build and maintain them, just as sophisticated censorship systems require human operators to retrain algorithms as the linguistic vocabulary of political dissent inevitably shifts. Behind every complex machine-learning model stands a small, indispensable group of software engineers and data scientists performing essential technical maintenance, operating in a domain so specialized that political rulers cannot possibly comprehend the mechanics.
Consequently, this profound technical dependence morphs into a formidable new form of political power. The engineers who maintain an autocrat’s expansive surveillance apparatus, for instance, retain the quiet ability to shape precisely what the ruler is allowed to see. They determine which streams of information are sufficiently important to pass along to leadership and dictate the specific format in which those reports are presented. They configure the algorithms that flag domestic threats, and they retain the power to subtly adjust the parameters that dictate which online content gets suppressed and which citizens get arrested. Crucially, they can execute these maneuvers without anyone inside the palace ever noticing. Autocrats who turn to artificial intelligence to escape their historical dependence on unreliable human subordinates have simply transferred their vulnerabilities onto a radically new, highly concentrated group of technical officials.
In many respects, this emerging digital Praetorian Guard could prove significantly more dangerous to a regime than previous ruling elites. This heightened risk stems partly from the inherent technical opacity of artificial intelligence technology, but also from the starkly compact size of this elite clique. Historically, Roman emperors relied on tens of thousands of soldiers serving within the Praetorian Guard, while modern autocrats have traditionally depended on massive standing armies.
Under an AI-driven governance model, however, an autocrat requires only a tight-knit clique of specialized engineers to construct and maintain large-scale computational systems. While this initially appears advantageous to rulers because there are fewer human actors to watch, it dangerously concentrates points of structural failure. A devastating disruption to the regime requires only the deliberate actions of a handful of engineers, while simultaneously making it much easier for members of this technical elite to covertly scheme against the supreme leader. Furthermore, the members of this new guard are virtually irreplaceable during a crisis. While an authoritarian ruler can readily replace military generals without collapsing the armed forces, running complex, nation-spanning machine-learning systems requires such a rare, specialized set of technical skills that engineers are exceptionally difficult to swap out without triggering catastrophic administrative disruptions, thereby granting these technical actors immense political leverage.
The Indispensables
The profound geopolitical importance of technology workers to autocratic regimes has already manifested clearly in real-world crises. When IT specialists began fleeing Russia in large numbers following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin reacted not with immediate threats of punishment, but with targeted inducements. The state offered tech professionals formal deferments from military conscription, exempted their corporate firms from heavy taxation, and heavily subsidized their residential mortgages.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin subsequently ordered the mobilization of 300,000 reservists seven months later, domestic IT workers were granted comprehensive, blanket waivers from active deployment. While this level of administrative exemption might initially seem excessive given that a standard AI system requires only a handful of engineers to operate, an authoritarian regime cannot know in advance precisely which specific engineers it will need during a crisis, nor can it train qualified replacements quickly. Consequently, the state is forced to protect and retain the entire domestic talent pool from which these few indispensable specialists are drawn.
Despite these aggressive state incentives, the measures failed to stem the steady outflow of roughly 100,000 technology specialists—representing about a tenth of Russia’s total tech workforce—over the course of 2022. Yet Moscow steadfastly stuck to financial bribery and administrative privileges, recognizing that high-level technical expertise is exceptionally difficult to conscript at gunpoint, and that forcibly conscripted experts would likely prove far less compliant when given instructions.
Even so, concentrated money and social privilege cannot guarantee that these technical elites will remain politically loyal. Modern autocrats would be wise to recall the timeless historical lesson of the original Roman Praetorian Guard: for a considerable period, the guard provided emperors with reliable protection and personal security. Eventually, however, the praetorians realized their own absolute indispensability, and by the second century, they were openly auctioning off the imperial throne to the highest bidder.
A modern digital elite possesses the capacity to do precisely the same thing. In June 2023, when an armed column of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner paramilitary company rolled up the highway toward Moscow, President Putin relied heavily on his security services to inform him of unfolding events. Future rulers occupying Putin’s precarious position will receive such critical warnings exclusively through machines: intercepted communications automatically sorted by linguistic software, live camera feeds filtered through facial recognition systems, and regional intelligence reports compiled into automated executive dashboards.
The software engineers who operate and maintain those underlying systems could easily strike a clandestine deal with an ambitious upstart challenger and deliberately drag their feet. They could intentionally delay critical data streams, allow security alerts to arrive hours late, degrade video feeds at the most inconvenient tactical moments, or cause a facial recognition network to experience sudden, unexplained malfunctions. In such a dystopian scenario, the ruler would be effectively operating completely blind. The Praetorian Guard did not actually need to assassinate Emperor Nero to replace him; they simply had to abandon him in his hour of need and shift their allegiance to a rival.
Admittedly, these computer programmers are unlikely to seize direct political power for themselves, primarily because they lack the physical instruments that coup leaders ultimately require: guns. Yet, historical precedent already exists for technical workers using their specialized infrastructure to profoundly shape major leadership challenges. In August 1991, when hardline elements of the Soviet military attempted to stage a coup and seize control from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a small group of computer programmers operating the Relcom network successfully kept independent information flowing abroad while rapidly relaying Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s decrees to domestic and international audiences. The coup plotters found themselves entirely unable to stop the rapid dissemination of news regarding Yeltsin’s public defiance, and the entire conspiracy collapsed within three days.
Slimming Down
Artificial intelligence will never allow autocrats to entirely dismiss all of their human enforcers. Human agents are still urgently required to conduct physical arrests, manage brutal prison systems, and project raw physical power, while autocrats must continue to buy baseline political loyalty by offering supporters lucrative state jobs.
Nevertheless, the technology will successfully enable authoritarian regimes to significantly downsize their bureaucratic apparatuses. Ultimately, the absolute number of state officials matters far less to a dictator than the efficiency with which the ruler can oversee them. Keeping close track of scheming, disloyal, or incompetent subordinates has historically been the single greatest administrative burden carried by any autocrat. Artificial intelligence promises to substantially lighten that heavy burden, empowering supreme rulers to monitor their government officials much more closely without having to invest continuous, active personal attention.
In the near term, therefore, artificial intelligence may deliver massive strategic benefits to global autocracies. Despite the numerous logistical, technical, and political obstacles standing in the way of widespread deployment, the technology is already providing authoritarian regimes with the tangible financial and operational upsides of cheaper mass surveillance, smarter and faster censorship, and a significantly smaller pool of human subordinates to fear and distrust.
Yet, for these autocratic rulers, the intoxicating temptations of artificial intelligence may ultimately recreate the exact political trap they are desperately seeking to escape. The deeper a regime sinks into its dependence on artificial intelligence, the more profoundly it becomes dependent on the small group of human beings who keep that artificial intelligence running. And those technical specialists, much like every other praetorian class throughout recorded history, will inevitably discover precisely what their absolute indispensability is worth.
Cyber Security & Cryptography
Cyber Security & Cryptography
Cyber Security & Cryptography
