Russia decides sovereignty means building its own AI

Vladimir Putin has moved to establish a national task force charged with coordinating Russia’s generative AI efforts, casting continued dependence on foreign large language models as incompatible with the country’s sovereignty. He has since gone further, signing a decree creating a presidential commission on AI development, converting the announcement into a standing structure with authority over funding and policy across ministries. The instinct itself is not new: sanctions and export controls have already cut Russian developers off from the latest Western chips and, increasingly, from the cloud infrastructure that trains frontier models. What is new is the explicit political framing: AI dependency is being treated less as a commercial inconvenience than as a strategic vulnerability on a par with energy or defence supply chains.

The practical starting point is thinner than the rhetoric suggests. Russian firms such as Sberbank and Yandex already run their own large language models, built with a mix of domestic engineering and hardware improvised around sanctions, but neither has demonstrated the scale or reliability of the systems now shipping from Western and Chinese labs. A coordinating commission can align funding, data access and procurement across ministries and state-linked companies, but it cannot conjure the advanced compute that remains the binding constraint on any serious model-training effort.

Declaring AI sovereignty a national priority is easier than building the compute base to make it real.

The more interesting comparison is with China, which has spent years cultivating open-weight models as a soft-power asset and has built a far more developed domestic chip supply chain than Russia’s, even though its own access to the most advanced chips is still constrained by Western export controls. Moscow’s version of the sovereignty argument arrives with none of that industrial base, which makes the initiative read as much as a signal of intent and a hedge against deeper technological isolation as a credible plan to close the gap with the AI frontier.