Targeting Loyalty: AI Surveillance and the Erosion of Universal Welfare in Autocracies

Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely assumed to enhance governance by improving state capacity, efficiency, and responsiveness. Yet in autocracies, these same technologies are repurposed as instruments of surveillance and control. This paper argues that AI fundamentally reshapes how authoritarian rulers sustain political support. To remain in power, autocrats must balance repression and co-optation, but limited information about citizens’ true preferences has historically forced them to rely on costly, universal welfare programs. AI-based surveillance alleviates this informational problem by vastly expanding rulers’ capacity to collect and analyze citizens’ behavior and preferences. As a result, autocrats recalibrate welfare provision from a universal instrument of broad co-optation to a targeted mechanism of selective control. To test this argument, I draw on the AI & Big Data Global Surveillance Index by Steve Feldstein—compiling data from government and NGO reports, technology company records, and international media sources—to track the diffusion of AI surveillance technologies across 65 authoritarian regimes between 2000 and 2023. Using multiple V-Dem indicators capturing different dimensions of welfare provision in autocracies, and employing panel regressions with regime and year fixed-effects, I show that AI surveillance systematically reduces universal welfare provision, increases clientelism, and exacerbates political exclusion in access to public goods.