Rostelecom Subsidiary Solar Fines Contractors 30% for Using Unauthorized AI

A cybersecurity subsidiary of state telecom giant Rostelecom, Solar, has started mandating severe anti-AI clauses in all its vendor agreements. The policy initially came to light in paperwork for a subcontractor on a deal with the Russian Prosecutor General's Office, but the company confirmed it now applies to absolutely all new contracts across the board.

If a contractor dares to outsource so much as a single boilerplate function to a neural net without explicit written blessing, Solar reserves the right to slash the final payout by 30%. In addition, the firm can flat-out terminate the deal on the spot, refuse to pay for already completed milestones, demand reimbursement for forensics costs used to detect the digital ghostwriter, and force the contractor to manually redo everything from scratch.

Technically, vendors are allowed to use modern tools, provided they navigate an excruciating obstacle course of paper bureaucracy. A contractor must submit a formal letter specifying the exact AI model, verify every single machine-generated output by hand, document each step, and swear never to use any project data to train future models. Furthermore, if the neural net accidentally hallucinates copyrighted intellectual property, the external vendor takes 100% of the financial and legal heat.

Legal observers point out that stripping roughly a third of a contract's value regardless of whether the generated output actually caused real harm resembles an aggressive forfeit that could trigger court disputes. Moreover, without reliable automated detection tools capable of proving who typed what, the policy creates an open invitation for developers to simply hide their everyday assistants beneath extra layers of manual obfuscation.

Attempting to banish large language models by contractual fiat inside state-controlled tech ecosystems feels remarkably like trying to outlaw rain by fining umbrellas. The inevitable result won't be pure artisan code crafted by digital ascetics, but merely an underground economy of developers frantically paraphrasing the machine's output so nobody spots the silicon fingerprints.