The FSB Commissioned an AI Assistant to Monitor the Media, but the Developers Failed to Deliver — Important Stories Investigation

The FSB commissioned an AI assistant to monitor the media, but the developers failed to deliver — an investigation by Important Stories

The FSB’s Second Service, responsible for “protecting the constitutional order and combating terrorism,” has begun introducing artificial intelligence into its workflows. Development was assigned to the Kazan-based company Mikord, one of the key developers of the unified military registration registry.

In December 2025, an anonymous hacker group managed to hack Mikord. Thanks to this leak, Important Stories learned about the project “Spider” — the “Content Analytics and Management Portal,” which Mikord had been working on for a year and a half.

With its help, the FSB planned to combine information from the media with internal databases and create a neural-network assistant. “Spider” was supposed to independently collect publications from Meduza, Sirena, OVD-Info, 7x7, and other uncensored outlets and upload them to an internal portal to produce a daily digest.

How Spider was supposed to work, who ordered the development of the service, and why the project never got off the ground — read the Important Stories investigation on the project’s website:

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