Dude is 64 years old, and was never seen using a computer. Give him a break on this one, he's likely just parroting Medvedev, who in turn is parroting one of his distant underlings.
Putin became acting president of Russian Federation on New Years Eve 1999. In months since, the only thing he brought into Yeltsin's former office was a computer[1]. He may not be a digital native, but to underestimate him is a mistake.
But either way, it's more likely he's "parroting" secret U.S. military plans that his spies obtained for him.
This is almost certainly what our military is planning and he almost certainly knows it.
Putin has spent his entire life keeping tabs on the U.S. military's plans and actions. He knows definitely what the U.S. military is working on
When he raises the issue publicly, he's executing a strategy against that effort.
Authoritarian survivors like him tend to have an extremely well tuned grasp of threats to their power. Whether those are technology based or people, and whether they are domestic or foreign based. The small group of people running the CCP are similarly competent at spotting such threats, regardless of their understanding of technology. Most of the politicians that have supported the great firewall over the years, very likely had a limited understanding of the technology involved. They didn't need to understand the technology at an intimate level, they understood some of what it could enable, they understood the potential threat to their power. These people develop an almost sixth sense about it, they spend their entire lives cultivating that awareness as a means of survival and promotion.
The biggest (and only) threat to Putin's survival is a coup.
AI as a military technology can threaten Russia. It can cripple their economy. It can cripple their military technology (depending). Over decades it will likely lead to faster advances in both the economic and military spheres (including nuclear weapons and missile defenses), which would net weaken Russia. The winner accelerates, which is exactly what happened to the US vs the USSR when it came to the massive tech economy the US built out post WW2 (now our economy is ~16x the size of Russia's).
Kim Jung-un?
is there any evidence of this? This might be true, but does not seem self evident to me.
Citation needed