The Hungarian Integrity Agency has developed and implemented an innovative AI model to analyze the country’s financial transactions in real time. The technology’s main goal is to identify and help the new government recover more than €160 billion in public funds that were allegedly misappropriated by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s entourage during his 16 years in power.
The Hungarian Integrity Agency has developed and implemented an innovative AI model to analyze the country’s financial transactions in real time. The technology’s main goal is to identify and help the new government recover more than €160 billion in public funds that were allegedly misappropriated by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s entourage during his 16 years in power.
The head of the agency, Ferenc Biro, spoke about the launch of the development in an interview with the Financial Times. The new tool became a technological response to the systemic pressure and large-scale schemes of the Orbán era, which were previously almost impossible to track manually.
According to Biro, the integrated system based on artificial intelligence and machine learning is capable of monitoring Hungary’s economic operations «on the fly.» This allows it to automatically detect anomalies in government tenders and track the movement of assets, a significant part of which is currently abroad.
The use of AI has become critically necessary due to the colossal scale of abuse: if in 2010, at the beginning of Orbán’s rule, the misuse of the budget was only 2–3%, then in 2025 this figure reached a record 15–20%.
«They saw that the Orbán era was coming to an end, and they tried to squeeze every penny they could out of it,» said Biro, commenting on the peak growth in corruption in the last year of the former cabinet. He added that before the change of power, officials tightened control over financial flows by 50%, trying to quickly master budgets.
The development of the technology and the investigation of government tenders were accompanied by fierce resistance. In 2024, the then ministers of justice and EU affairs personally demanded that the Bureau stop the agency’s work. And in early 2025, after submitting a detailed report on the centralization of public procurement, the offices of the Integrity Office were searched with the involvement of armed special services.
The new government of Hungary, led by Peter Magyar, who led the country after winning the elections, has focused on expanding technological monitoring tools and creating a separate Asset Recovery Agency.
Recall that last year, a number of Ukrainian publications reported that Albania’s AI Minister Diella was suspected of accepting a bribe in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and was taken offline. This turned out to be «news» from the humorous Croatian website Newsbar.
