The Logic of GenAI Deployment by Authoritarians: A Look at Russia and China

What is the role of GenAI in authoritarian politics? For one, recent breakthroughs in GenAI technologies offer economic benefits such as productivity gains, cost savings, and enhanced decision-making. But simultaneously, they have become new tools for digital repression and defamation. Recently, autocracies have increasingly weaponized these technologies against perceived domestic and foreign threats by automating the production of pro-regime media content and accelerating disinformation campaigns against their opponents. Yet the theorization of how the appropriation of these technologies relate to authoritarian regime maintenance remains significantly limited to date. This article argues that autocrats facing the ‘digital dilemma’ adopt and regulate emerging GenAI technologies to (1) maximize economic benefits that come with new techniques and to (2) also maximize political benefits through effective image management, as well as (3) minimize political threats by enhancing political control over the information space through inauthentic content. Drawing on official documents, statistics on GenAI market size and investments, and reports by digital rights watchdogs, we discuss authoritarian applications of GenAI by Russia and China to empirically illustrate our central propositions. Both ‘hard autocracies,’ Russia and China have enacted AI strategies and regulatory frameworks and promoted investments in GenAI aimed at transforming their economies, while politically they integrated these technologies into their existing manipulation strategies. Internationally, Chinese Communist Party- and Kremlin-linked actors alike have targeted audiences and public opinion in societies such Western liberal democracies, in their near abroad, as well as in strategically important countries of the Global South with GenAI-based misinformation campaigns on politically divisive issues. We illustrate how autocracies exploit emerging technologies like GenAI and thereby demonstrate their common political logic of authoritarian regime maintenance in the digital sphere. Yet, we also see crucial differences between the two regimes as regards their particular domestic and foreign policy priorities, and as regards the modes of deployment of GenAI-based misinformation. The resulting policies that the two regimes follow in their GenAI development and deployment differ, which leads us to hypothesize on hitherto divergent strategies of GenAI development and usage. Then again, such strategies may converge over time depending on a range of contingencies. The contribution hence strengthens our understanding of the political logic behind authoritarian transformations in the digital era as advancements in AI continue to redefine the relationship between state and society as well as foreign policy practices of autocracies. Both the transnational and domestic dimensions of GenAI usage impact on autocratic survival prospects