In the fall of 2024, Italian police used AI to analyze photographs taken at a popular antique fair, identifying a particular oil painting as having been one stolen from a church near L’Aquila 20 years prior.

The Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Italy’s art crime squad, has been using an AI algorithm to identify stolen artworks and artifacts since 2023. The platform they use is called SWOADS—or Stolen Works of Art Detection System—and was developed by Salvatore Rapicavoli, an IT engineer who joined the art crime team in 2023.

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A BBC article detailed the process, which began with Italian police officers visiting Mercanteinfiera, a 40-year-old “antiques village” that attracts exhibitors from all over Europe, in October 2024. When the officers uploaded their photographs into the art crime database, Swoads flagged a particular image of a young woman holding a scroll.…