A painting went missing 20 years ago. Police tracked it down with the help of AI

Italian police used a custom AI system called Swoads, which compares images of artworks at fairs and online against a database of over one million stolen cultural artefacts, to flag a painting at the Parma antiquity fair in October 2024. The work turned out to be a 17th-Century painting of Saint Agnese stolen from a church near Naples in 2004 and painted over to disguise it, and it was returned to the church on 20 May 2025. Since its introduction in November 2023, the system has helped recover more than 300 large plundered paintings and statues and over 165,000 smaller objects worth more than €203m.