Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the government and big banks to cooperate with China on AI. Russia is still searching for alternative technologies after invading Ukraine due to Western sanctions. An AI partnership between Russia and China could raise concerns about censorship, among other things.
Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to seek more challenges to the Western order – this time in technology.
According to a Dec. 30 post on the Kremlin’s website, the Russian leader has ordered his government and Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, to cooperate with China on artificial intelligence.
According to a Kremlin post, President Putin instructed the government and Sberbank to “ensure further cooperation with the People’s Republic of China in technological research and development in the field of artificial intelligence.” The book was published three weeks after President Putin announced the BRICS AI Alliance Network.
President Putin has tasked Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Sberbank CEO German Gref with leading the AI effort. Progress is expected to be reported by April.
Russia is building a parallel system with the West
Putin’s directive comes 34 months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, triggering widespread Western sanctions against the regime.
Trade restrictions have hurt Russia’s access to financial payments technology, and the country is seeking alternatives in the form of parallel imports and domestic substitutes.
Russia is also building alternative systems to process payment transactions and transport sanctioned oil around the world.
However, finding technology to replace Western products was not easy.
A former senior Russian finance official told Reuters in September 2022 that Russia would spend years using second-class technology and spending “huge resources” to rebuild existing ones. . Products heavily affected by Western sanctions include semiconductor chips, aviation parts, and medical products.
Sberbank CEO Gref said in April 2023 that graphics cards for AI and supercomputers are the most difficult to replace.
The United States has restricted sales of advanced computer chips to Russia starting in 2022, and last year further tightened export controls on third-party chips to Russia.
Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakin told Reuters last month that Russia is six to nine months behind the United States and China in AI on various parameters.
Vedyakin told the news agency that Russia would focus on developing large-scale language models rather than building large-scale data centers.
A potential partnership between Russia and China in AI could raise concerns beyond sanctions avoidance.
China’s advances in AI have raised concerns about censorship in a country where expression is tightly controlled.
In July, the Financial Times reported that Chinese authorities had tested a large language model of the Chinese language to ensure it embodies “core socialist values.”
