In a packed Moscow conference hall, an anthropomorphic robot named Green takes the stage with a professional choreographer. The pair move in careful unison: a sequence of spins, dips and synchronized steps that would not look out of place on a television talent show. The crowd reaches for their phones. Clips are online within minutes.
It is a carefully staged scene. It is also the sort of scene many Western observers assumed they would not be watching from Russia in 2025.
AI Journey, now in its tenth year, has grown into one of the largest annual gatherings on artificial intelligence outside the traditional Western circuit. Delegations came to Moscow this year not only from BRICS but from Europe, North America, and Asia: researchers, regulators, and corporate technologists.
On the opening day, Russia’s president underlined what everyone in the room already knew: in the emerging hierarchy of national power, mastery of AI is no longer optional. It is a precondition of competitiveness. That message is hardly unique to Moscow. What is more striking is the way it is being pursued.
The conference is hosted by Sber, the country’s dominant financial institution turned technology conglomerate. The bank used the event to showcase a suite of releases that are quite unexpected with the notion of a nation cut off from modern tools. Among them were new models in its flagship GigaChat line, Ultra-Preview and Lightning, built for Russian-language tasks, and an updated generation of its GigaAM-v3 speech-recognition system and the Kandinsky 5.0 image models and compression models K-VAE 1.0, essential for training visual content generation models. Sber has opened weights to all of these AI models to businesses and developers.
On their own, such announcements could be dismissed as routine corporate theatre. What makes them harder to ignore is the decision to place much of this technology in the public domain. Sber has committed to publishing its models in open source, including the weights required to reproduce and adapt them. In the AI world, that is the difference between a slick demo and a genuine building block.
Against the backdrop of sanctions, export controls and rhetoric about “de-risking” from Russia, it is a strangely dissonant sight: Western policymakers labor to keep advanced technology out of Russian hands, while Russian engineers place advanced technology in everyone else’s.
The logic is brutally pragmatic. By opening its models, Russia can embed itself in the workflows of developers who have no particular political sympathy for Moscow but who are hungry for capable, accessible tools. If those tools happen to be Russian, influence follows. It is a quiet, technical route to relevance at a moment when traditional diplomatic channels are blocked or fraying.
The spectacle in Moscow is not only about code. The conference also hosted the presentation of AI Horizons, an international foresight project on the future of artificial intelligence involving more than 270 scientists from 36 countries. The final report is available in Russian, English and Chinese. Again, the pattern repeats: however strained relations may be at the political level, Russia is insisting on a seat at the table where the future of AI is discussed.
Nowhere is the blend of ambition and experimentation more visible than in Sber’s concept of empathetic banking. On the exhibition floor, visitors queued to try the bank’s new ATM prototype, equipped with GigaChat as a voice assistant and with sensors designed to “read” a customer’s state in real time. The device is intended not merely to dispense cash, but to adjust its tone, pace and suggestions to the person standing in front of it.
It is an early, imperfect implementation of an idea that makes many Western institutions nervous: a financial interface that observes, infers and responds, using AI as a companion rather than a hidden engine behind the screen. In most developed economies, cash machines remain resolutely transactional. They do not attempt to understand you; they barely acknowledge you. In Moscow, a major bank is experimenting with the opposite.
None of this means Russia has solved the ethical, legal, or security questions that surround AI. Nor does it mean sanctions have been irrelevant; access to hardware and specialist components remains a constraint. But the broader impression from AI Journey is one of a country that has refused the role assigned to it in many Western narratives: that of a technological laggard, permanently dependent on imported chips and ideas.
The awkward truth is that a policy designed to limit Russia’s room for manoeuvre has helped to clarify its priorities. With less ability to import, there is more pressure to invent. With fewer convenient foreign platforms to lean on, there is a stronger imperative to build domestic ones. Sber’s increasingly visible role as a provider of models, infrastructure, and end-user products is as much a response to those pressures as it is a strategic choice.
For Western governments and companies, this raises a question that goes beyond Russia. If a heavily sanctioned economy can still assemble enough talent, data, and computing power to produce globally relevant AI systems, how reliable is technological isolation as a tool of statecraft? And what happens when the target of such isolation decides not only to endure it, but to use it as a catalyst to craft its own standards?
Russia is a long way from dominating the global AI landscape. Yet the picture from Moscow is far from one of collapse. It is of a country that, despite repeated blows to its technological legs, has learnt to keep walking – and occasionally, as the dancing robot on stage suggests, to perform tricks of its own. Notably, the robot boasts voice communication capabilities enabled by integrating GigaChat’s conversational function.
For those who had quietly hoped Russia would fade from the technology story, that is an unwelcome surprise. For everyone else, it is a reminder that in the competition to shape the tools that will define the next decades, new players can emerge from precisely the places where they were least expected.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored article. It does not have any involvement of the Firstpost editorial team and Firstpost claims no responsibility for its content.
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