FSB Fails AI Chatbot

Independent Russian outlet Vazhnye Istory revealed how the FSB’s Second Service, which handles constitutional security and counterterrorism, tried to build an AI assistant for intelligence officers. The contractor was Mikord, a little-known Kazan company that had worked on Russia’s military registry and was later hacked.

In spring 2024, Mikord received an order to develop a "Portal analitiki i upravleniya kontentom" (A Portal for Analytics and Content Management), abbreviated in Russian as PAUK (Spider). The name also evokes web crawlers, programs that automatically scan websites and collect information.

Although the Second Service was not formally listed as the state customer, its representatives were expected to oversee key stages of development and approve the work schedule.

PAUK was intended to automate a situation center, apparently operated by the Second Service. Staff there monitor Russian and foreign media and prepar daily news briefings for senior FSB officials.

The crawler would gather relevant stories and publish them on an internal portal, allowing duty officers to select items for each day’s report. Completed briefings would be stored on a closed network. The system was also designed to let officers search for people and events and use a large language model to work with media reports and "other materials from closed sources" through a chatbot interface.

Project documents said responses about "persons or objects of interest" could include full names, birth dates, regions, phone numbers, license plates, and vehicle makes.

FSB supervisors gave Mikord real briefings produced from January 2024 through June 2025. Developers analyzed them to identify the websites and Telegram channels most frequently used by the service.

Vazhnye Istory reviewed nearly 5,000 items and grouped them by subject. The largest category was "sabotage and terrorism in Russia," including online extremism, alleged Ukrainian and Western spies, weapons trafficking, and Islamist activity.

Other major categories covered attacks and wars abroad, foreign policy, and protests in Russia. Environmental protests appeared frequently, including repeated coverage of demonstrations against a proposed landfill in Sysert, in the Sverdlovsk Oblast. 

The FSB also closely tracked reports about migrants, foreign protests, ethnic tensions in Europe, foreign agents, and political prisoners.

According to Vazhnye Istory, independent Russian media were among the Second Service’s most important sources. In the first half of 2025, Activatica, RusNews, and Govorit NeMoskva ranked among the five most-cited outlets. From January 2024 through June 2025, more than 550 reports from uncensored outlets appeared in FSB briefings, over 10% of the total. Sources included OVD-Info, 7x7, Sirena and Meduza.

Despite the project’s secrecy, Mikord relied on foreign technology. Current interface designs were stored in Figma. Developers planned to use the U.S.-built LlamaIndex framework, Meta’s Llama 2 model, and MongoDB to store officers’ chatbot sessions.

The first phase was due in fall 2025. Around then, after nearly 18 months of work, a Mikord manager wrote in the company’s task tracker: "Work on the project has been suspended." Another employee replied: "Goodbye, project."

A source familiar with the development told Vazhnye Istory that Mikord failed to deliver a working system on time, prompting officials to shut it down. An IT specialist who reviewed the documents said the company likely lacked the experience and technical expertise needed to work with large language models.