Duma speaker warns Putin about Europe’s ‘AI minister’ corruption scandal, unaware it was Croatian satire

The Russian parliament’s top lawmaker made a fool of himself earlier this week in President Putin’s presence, but don’t expect much to come of it. At a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s Parliamentary Assembly Council, which was attended by Putin, State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin recounted a fabricated news story that had appeared a few days earlier on a Croatian satirical website. Journalists at Provereno Media were the first to report the incident.

Volodin said that the application of artificial intelligence requires legislative oversight. While he insisted that AI ought to be supported, he added that “there are challenges and problems” inherent in its use. “In one E.U. country, they went and ‘appointed’ a minister in the form of artificial intelligence, and now it’s facing accusations of embezzlement,” Volodin said, citing the case as evidence of the risks tied to AI.

In September, the authorities in Albania — which is not a member of the European Union — announced the appointment of the “world’s first AI minister.” Named Diella and imagined as a young woman dressed in traditional Albanian attire, this “minister” is an artificial intelligence model integrated into the government’s public contracts website.

Diella is programmed to audit contracts with private firms and flag or block questionable deals. Albanian authorities have officially added her to the cabinet as the country’s “minister of artificial intelligence.” Deploying AI in its public procurement system is among the anti-corruption measures Albania must implement ahead of a possible bid to join the E.U.

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However, the “news report” that the AI minister supposedly embezzled funds is entirely fabricated. The story surfaced a few days ago on the Croatian satirical website Newsbar, which publishes daily fictional stories.

Newsbar reported that during its training, Diella reviewed 30 years of government procurement data and concluded that taking bribes in the Balkans was normal bureaucratic work, not criminal activity. The AI then allegedly accepted 14 bitcoins (roughly $92,700 at current exchange rates) from a contractor to greenlight a highway construction project. The article concluded by stating that ChatGPT would serve as Diella’s attorney and that, pending the investigation, the minister’s responsibilities would be handled by “an old Casio calculator model.”

Several major Russian Telegram news channels, each with hundreds of thousands of followers, picked up the Newsbar story. It was probably on one of those channels that Volodin (or a member of his staff) saw it.

Provereno Media points out that Newsbar’s satire has previously slipped into Russian Telegram news feeds, masquerading as genuine reporting. In October 2025, a story about a snake that bit a Croatian man and then died of alcohol poisoning racked up several million views. That “report” first appeared on Newsbar back in 2020.