Russia's FSB Second Service attempted to automate dissent monitoring with Meta's Llama 2 — project collapsed after 1.5 years
The FSB's Second Service, responsible for protecting constitutional order and combating terrorism, commissioned an AI system PAUK for news and social media monitoring. The system, based on Meta's Llama 2, was developed but work was suspended after a year and a half due to lack of experience and expertise.
According to an investigation by iStories, the FSB's Second Service, known as "Dvoyka", ordered an AI-powered system for monitoring news outlets and social media in the spring of 2024. The developer was the Kazan-based company Mikord, which had also worked on components of Russia's unified military registry and was hacked in December 2025. The system was called PAUK (Portal for Analytics and Content Management).
The Second Service is officially tasked with protecting the constitutional order and counterterrorism, but in practice it works to suppress dissent. It has been involved in poisoning opposition politicians, restricting internet access, and monitoring news. PAUK was designed to automate this monitoring using a web crawler to collect news from specified sources and an AI assistant based on Meta's Llama 2, a large language model developed by Meta, which Russia has designated an "extremist organization".
The system was to run on two networks: an external one with internet access and an internal one without. An on-duty FSB officer could edit, rate, and comment on news items, while the AI assistant helped search through data. The project was suspended in the fall of 2025. An IT specialist reviewing the documentation said the team lacked the experience to work with language models, and a source familiar with the project said Mikord missed its deadline and never produced a working service.
iStories analyzed nearly 5,000 news items from FSB summaries between January 2024 and June 2025. The Second Service closely tracks not only terrorism and protests, but also pressure on migrants, strikes, and interethnic conflicts in Europe. Independent media account for over 10% of all items. The most frequently cited source was Aktivatika, which covers civic activism and repression.
The FSB most likely already uses a similar system: Kribrum, a media monitoring service founded in 2010. PAUK may have been an attempt to replace that external service with an in-house solution.
