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The artificial intelligence volcano is erupting. Americans, Chinese and Europeans are jostling to capture the best fallout from this digital lava. In the midst of this global racket, Vladimir Putin is playing his own role, the countercurrent. The master of the Kremlin does not want a piece of the pie, but intends to own the entire bakery. His new law on artificial intelligence does not aim at unbridled innovation, but at the methodical lock-in of every model deemed strategic. The goal: to create a 100% Russian AI, clean of any Western contamination. An obsession that could well turn out to be a trap.
In short
- The new Russian law classifies artificial intelligence into three distinct categories: sovereign, national and trusted.
- So-called “sovereign” models must be developed without any use of foreign components or data.
- Despite this discourse of independence, Russian developers are heavily dependent on Western open-sources such as LLaMA or Mistral.
- Meanwhile, Russia is using generative artificial intelligence to produce deepfakes aimed at destabilizing European public opinion.
Putin and AI: the quest for impossible digital purity
When Vladimir Putin talks about artificial intelligence, he’s not talking about algorithms or computing power. He talks about civilization. “For Russia, it is a question of national, technological and value-based sovereignty,” he said at a recent conference in Moscow..” (“For Russia, this is a matter of national, technological and value-based sovereignty.” – Source: Reuters).
In his view of the world, every Western artificial intelligence carries a foreign cultural software, an ideological Trojan horse, which he refuses to accept on Russian soil. The Kremlin has therefore presented legislative artillery with a draft law that classifies models into three airtight categories. The “sovereign” model must be developed exclusively by Russian citizens, trained only on data produced in Russia, without the use of foreign components.
The “national” model tolerates the use of open-source solutions from elsewhere, while the “trusted” model falls under the direct supervision of the FSB. In addition, the presidential decree established a special commission personally headed by Putin.
From now on, AI in Russia is becoming a state affair watched like milk on fire.
The Great Russian Schism: Declared Sovereignty, Presumed Dependence
Yet the declaration of technological independence ran into a wall of concrete reality. Russian experts in this sector have been sounding the alarm for several months. Developing a fully Russian artificial intelligence without borrowing from the global ecosystem would cost several hundred billion rubles. An account that end users would inevitably have to bear.
Added to this are Western sanctions that are literally strangling Russian data centers: no advanced semiconductors, no intensive computing, no high-performance models. A manager of a major Russian technology company told the Kommersant newspaper that “completely sovereign platforms are virtually non-existent on the market today.”
Even Sberbank, the Kremlin’s favorite public financial giant and pioneer of patriotic artificial intelligence, is actually adapting foreign open-source models like LLaMA, Mistral or YOLO. The digital fortress dreamed of by Putin thus remains on imported foundations. Proclaimed sovereignty hides a very real dependence.
The shadow cast by Russian AI: when deepfakes wage war on Europe
As the Kremlin locks down its digital borders, its hybrid armies use artificial intelligence to destabilize Europe’s neighbors with formidable efficiency. The example of Professor Alan Read from King’s College London is especially telling. One day, a manipulated video using his face and a synthetic voice mimicking him and insulting Emmanuel Macron began to circulate on social media.
“Almost everything in this video is sickening, horrible to listen to,” the researcher told the BBC. It seems completely foreign to who I am.
Alan Read
This deepfake is part of a wider campaign called Matryoshka, named after those Russian dolls that hide others inside. In Poland, fake videos call for leaving the European Union, with turns of phrase revealing Russian syntax. Second-tier apps, less stringent than the US watermarking giants, provide these lures for pennies.
Disinformation thus becomes a low-cost exportable industry.
Russia’s five-point artificial intelligence strategy
- Legal classification: three distinct categories (sovereign, national, trust) subject to varying degrees of state control;
- Presidential Commission: a body under the direct control of Vladimir Putin that coordinates all national initiatives;
- Sberbank in the front line: the only player capable of attempting an “all-Russian” enterprise, but still dependent on foreign open source;
- Binding sanctions: lack of advanced semiconductors severely limiting available computing power;
- The Matryoshka campaign: a systematic deepfake operation aimed at destabilizing European public opinion.
Artificial intelligence is undeniably a boon to those who master it. But for those who lose their jobs, it is primarily an existential threat. More worryingly, its “artificial” nature could make it uncontrollable in the long run. A senior security official at Anthropic recently resigned after sounding the alarm on this exact risk. For his part, Putin continues to lock down without looking back. Maybe a little too fast.
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