The FSB’s Second Service attempted to launch a system called “Spider”, designed to combine media publications, internal documents, and data from closed databases. According to Important Stories, the project was conceived as an AI assistant for security officials: it was meant to help search for information about events, compile news briefings, and retrieve data on people of interest to the agency. But after about a year and a half, the development was stopped because the contractor never managed to build a functioning service.
The investigation is based on documents from the company Mikord. The outlet says that in December 2025, hackers breached the company’s infrastructure and passed the files to the human rights project Get Lost, which then shared them with journalists.
Who was involved in the project
Work on Spider began in spring 2024. The formal customer was military unit 43753, the FSB’s Center for Information Protection and Special Communications, while the contractor was the Kvant Research Institute. The Kazan-based company Mikord was brought in for development. Journalists say the likely end user was the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order, better known as the FSB’s Second Service.
How the system was supposed to work
The name Spider stood for “Portal for Analytics and Content Management”. The service was intended to automate a situation center whose staff monitor Russian and foreign media and prepare briefs for FSB leadership. The system was supposed to collect publications from designated sources and assign categories, keywords, tags, and the names of people mentioned in them. Telegram alerts were also planned, along with CRM-like functions allowing managers to assign monitoring tasks and order background notes.
Spider was designed with open and closed segments. The closed segment was supposed to contain selected news items, internal briefs, documents, and data from external databases, without internet access. According to the report, the AI assistant was expected to provide information about people of interest to the FSB, including name, date of birth, region of residence, phone number, license plate, and car model. The system was initially planned for 30 employees, with the number of users later potentially growing to 400.
Data sources and why the project stopped
To train and configure the service, supervisors gave Mikord real Second Service briefs covering January 2024 through June 2025. They included nearly 5,000 news items from more than 1,000 sources, including media outlets, Telegram channels, VK communities, and YouTube. More than 550 items—over 10% of the selected material—came from independent media. In the first half of 2025, the most frequently cited sources included Aktivatika, RusNews, and Govorit NeMoskva.
The main briefing topics included sabotage and terrorism inside Russia, terrorist attacks and wars abroad, foreign policy, and protests. According to the investigation, developers stored interface mockups in Figma, while LlamaIndex, Llama 2, and MongoDB were planned for document processing and question answering. The first project phase was supposed to be completed in autumn 2025, but around that time the work tracker showed the project had been suspended. A source familiar with the development told Important Stories that Mikord missed the deadline and failed to produce a working product; an IT specialist interviewed by the outlet suggested the team lacked sufficient experience with language models.