Russia drafted plans for AI that could block 95% of VPNs — but the idea has quietly vanished from its national roadmap

A draft of Russia's national AI plan proposed using AI to analyze 70% of blocked VPN services and lift blocking effectiveness to 95% The Digital Development Ministry says the measure is absent from the current draft, but Roskomnadzor's separately budgeted and arguably crucial ML filtering project remains The 95% is an effectiveness target, not accuracy, and sources expect AI to raise false positives, with corporate VPN, cloud and voice traffic most exposed Russia's Digital Development Ministry considered using artificial intelligence to push the effectiveness of its VPN blocking to 95%, according to a front-page report in Kommersant .

The measure appeared in a draft of the country's national plan for implementing AI through 2030; the ministry now says it is not in the current version.

This isn't the first time such a move has been reported, but some earlier coverage might have been overzealous, to say the least, when it reported that "Russia Eyes AI-Powered VPN Crackdown With 95% Blocking Accuracy." The problem with that headline is that not only was that proposal dropped, but the 95% accuracy figure was never actually in play.

A draft that proposed AI use None of the above reporting should reassure an estimated 57 million Russians who rely on circumvention tools.

Roskomnadzor (the Federal agency tasked with "Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media") has its own machine-learning filtering project budgeted outside the national AI plan, and the money for Russia's blocking infrastructure is set to double next year.

Kommersant, which reviewed the draft, reports that the ministry wanted AI to analyze the characteristics of 70% of all the VPN services Russia blocks.

The drafters reckoned that would lift blocking effectiveness to 95%.

Asked about it, the ministry said the current draft of the plan "contains no such information," in Meduza's translation.

A source familiar with the discussions told Kommersant that agencies had pitched a range of measures for the plan, some of which may never be implemented, and that the traffic-analysis algorithms already in service are a form of intelligent analysis but do not count as AI.

An AI layer would behave fundamentally differently; rather than matching known signatures, models would weigh packet sizes and timing, session length, and the balance of inbound to outbound traffic, then flag likely VPN servers from indirect clues: how a node behaves, which host it sits on, and what its neighboring IP addresses look like.

The payoff is speed, catching new servers before they reach any blocklist.

Kommersant uses the word effectiveness, and the distinction matters: a blocking-effectiveness figure describes how much targeted traffic it stops.