AI can supercharge Putin’s goals, not his great-power ambitions

When Russian President Vladimir Putin imposed harsh censorship laws in the wake of his 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a major Russian publishing house took drastic action. Faced with trawling through the thousands of volumes it had published over the previous 20 years in light of the new restrictive criteria, the Eksmo-AST group trained an artificial intelligence agent to highlight books and passages that risked falling foul of the law so they could be removed from bookshelves. The publisher conducted some 20,000 checks, and 600 volumes were handed over to external experts for additional reviews, Oleg Novikov, the group’s president, told Russian state television.