Russia's Roskomnadzor AI VPN filter cost 2.27 billion rubles

The plan was first mentioned in January. In May it emerged that the neural network Astra AI, built by Astra Group, would be used. Experts guess it is a predictive model, not a large language model. It would not read the content of traffic. It would judge from outside signals how likely it is that someone is using a VPN.

What could the AI filter do to VPNs?

If that guess is right, VPN services could get worse even when they disguise their traffic and rotate addresses. Legitimate corporate services could also get caught. The source notes that accuracy will not be 100 percent, so false positives are possible. At modern connection speeds, the AI could also become a bottleneck, adding delays that annoy users.

What else might it be used for?

One possible role is writing signatures faster. DPI (deep packet inspection) systems use signatures to recognise and filter traffic without decrypting it, and they lose effectiveness when the signatures go stale. Blocked sites often reappear as mirrors, and banned material turns up elsewhere. Checking all that by hand is impossible. Machine learning might match content against a sample instead of relying only on domain names.