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This paper argues that while AI presents a powerful new tool for authoritarian control, its effectiveness is constrained by the very repressive institutions it is designed to serve. This constraint stems from what I term the \u201cauthoritarian data problem\u201d: citizens' strategic behavior under repression diminishes the amount of useful information in the data for training AI. The more repression there is, the less information exists in AI's training data, and the worse the AI performs. I illustrate this argument using an AI experiment and censorship data in China. I show that AI's accuracy in censorship decreases with increasing repression, especially during times of political crisis. I further show that this problem cannot be easily fixed with more data. Ironically, international data\u2014especially data from less repressive settings\u2014can help improve AI's ability to\u00a0censor.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1111\/ajps.70045","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,13]],"date-time":"2026-02-13T09:28:56Z","timestamp":1770974936000},"page":"1669-1685","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1002\/crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["The limits of AI for authoritarian control"],"prefix":"10.1111","volume":"70","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3696-3226","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Eddie","family":"Yang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Political Science Purdue University West Lafayette Indiana USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"311","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,13]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_8_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1257\/jep.33.2.31"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1086\/722039"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_4_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1093\/qje\/qjad012"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_5_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1093\/restud\/rdac056"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_6_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.2307\/2991824"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_7_1","first-page":"77","volume-title":"Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency","author":"Buolamwini Joy","year":"2018"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_8_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1086\/690303"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_9_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TBIOM.2019.2897801"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_10_1","unstructured":"Cox Gary W.2009. \u201cAuthoritarian Elections and Leadership Succession 1975\u20102004.\u201d Paper presented at the APSA 2009 Toronto meeting .https:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/Sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1449034"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_11_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1177\/0951629820927790"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_12_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Devlin Jacob Ming\u2010WeiChang KentonLee andKristinaToutanova.2019. \u201cBERT: Pre\u2010Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.\u201d InProceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies1:4171\u20134186.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/N19-1423"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_13_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1353\/jod.2019.0001"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_14_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1017\/S0003055409990219"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_15_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1257\/jel.20221494"},{"key":"e_1_2_8_16_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Esberg Jane.2025. \u201cThe Repression of Cultural Elites: Evidence from Argentina's Film Industry.\u201dThe Journal of Politics. 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