Authors

Anna Ryzhova¹;  ¹ University of Passau, Germany

Discussion

In 2022, two events have significantly transformed the dynamics of worldwide digital cooperation and accelerated “race to AI” (Smuha, 2021): Russia’s war on Ukraine and Open AI’s introduction of ChatGPT and the rapid following development of generative large language models (LLMs) (Fui-Hoon et al., 2023). Russia’s attack on Ukraine has formed a new international relations dynamic, within which big tech companies  started “taking sides” in political confrontation and imposing a digital blockade on Russia (Aviv & Ferri, 2023), leading to Russia striving to achieve “digital autonomy” and develop its own technology (Aviv & Ferri, 2023). At the same time, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has repeatedly stated, that Russia’s ambition is to become a world leader in creating AI technologies, as well as in Russian LLMs and AI products being adopted worldwide. As a result, Russia has a dilemma to solve, which is reflected in its AI regulations: on the one hand, as an authoritarian state it strives to keep the state control over AI technology, but on the other hand, it has to allow some room for innovation in order to develop its AI solutions and to make them attractive to the world

In the literature, Russian regulations on AI have been analysed from two angles. Some scholars consider Russia’s AI regulation framework to be an “ethics-based regulatory regime for AI” (Papyshev & Yarime 2024, P.1389), with government seeking to “ease regulatory oversight over the innovators” (Papyshev & Yarime 2024, P.1390).  Other scholars, such as Petrella et al. (2021) and Walters (2024) take a much more critical angle, pointing that the Russia’s AI regulations drafting and development was outsorced not just to any industry company, but to Sber, a government owned bank, and this action, on the contrary, demarcates government taking over the lead in overseeing AI regulations development.

At the same time, no existing research until now has analysed, how Russia’s AI regulations and regulatory regime changed in the aftermath of 2022, and also no analysis has been conducted from political communications perspective, accounting not only for the “hard regulations”, i.e. adopted by the government, but also for the “soft” ones, adopted and proposed by Russia’s tech companies. This contribution fills in this gap, by answering the following research question “What are the major documents and bodies, that regulate the development of the AI in Russia post-2022?”. I address this gap by conducting secondary discourse analysis of the documents.