A special AI tool has been developed in Italy that allows police to identify stolen works of art and antiques. It has already helped recover more than 300 stolen paintings and statues, as well as thousands of collector coins.
A special AI tool has been developed in Italy that allows police to identify stolen works of art and antiques. It has already helped recover more than 300 stolen paintings and statues, as well as thousands of collector coins.
According to the BBC, sometimes police officers take photos of items at antique fairs and then upload the images to an internal database, while AI helps find matches.
The system was introduced by Lieutenant Colonel Salvatore Rapicavoli of the Italian Cultural Heritage Police Unit. He was an IT engineer and joined the police in 2013.
His team has developed an artificial intelligence algorithm called Swoads that can match works of art, even finding similarities between color shades and approximate silhouettes.
“There is an exponential increase in the number of matches,” Rapicavoli states, because since its implementation in November 2023, the artificial intelligence system has helped his team recover more than 300 large paintings and statues, as well as more than 165,000 small coins, medals, letters, manuscripts, religious objects, stamps and postcards, for a total of more than 203 million euros.
It is known that since 1969, the Italian police have maintained a database of stolen cultural artifacts across the country, and this database is the largest in the world — it currently contains over a million items.
Artificial intelligence even detects fragments of paintings that have been cut and rearranged — as is often the case with large altarpieces sold in separate pieces.
For example, in 2026, the software allowed Rapicavoli’s team to recover Filippo Pazzi’s painting "The Shepherdess' Rest," stolen from a gallery in June 1972 and later discovered on an auction house’s website.
BBC journalists also note that the software will be useful in finding numerous artifacts — such as rare Ukrainian manuscripts or icons — that were stolen during the war.
Meanwhile, as dev.ua wrote, in the US , for the first time, an employee chose the right not to use AI at work.
