Eksmo-AST uses AI to flag 600 book volumes under Russian censorship law

Eksmo-AST's move shows how quickly AI tooling can be repurposed when the operating environment changes abruptly. Its trigger was a legal one: Russia's censorship laws, imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, created new restrictive criteria that the publisher had to apply retroactively to a catalogue built over two decades. Training an AI agent to scan that backlist for risky books and passages was the company's answer, and the roughly 20,000 checks it ran suggest the scale of the job.

The detail that matters most is where the AI's authority stops. Of the flagged material, 600 volumes were sent to external experts for additional review — a second, human layer before any decision. So the agent is not the final judge; it is a first-pass filter that narrows what people then examine.

Oleg Novikov's framing — "We're here on the frontier of technological progress" — reads as an attempt to present the tooling as a capability story rather than a censorship story. How the 600 volumes fare in external review, and whether the AI agent becomes a standard part of the publisher's workflow, is the test of whether this stays a compliance measure or becomes a permanent publishing tool.