Alexander Vedyakhin: “The AI Alliance is banking on open source to give developers, researchers, and businesses direct access to top-tier large models developed in Russia”

The AI Alliance is banking on open source to give developers, researchers, and businesses direct access to top-tier large models developed in Russia—without having to rely on foreign alternatives. This strengthens the country’s open AI ecosystem.

As part of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2026, Sberbank’s First Deputy Chairman of the Management Board, and Chairman of the AI Alliance’s Supervisory Board, Alexander Vedyakhin, gave an interview to the Chinese tech publication NetEase Tech, in which he discussed key Russian developments presented at the forum, the prospects for the agent economy, and the role of open-source models.

Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Sberbank:

“At the AI Alliance, we are committed to open source to give developers, researchers, and businesses direct access to top-tier large models developed in Russia—without having to rely on foreign alternatives. This strengthens the country’s open AI ecosystem. Any team with sufficient technical resources can take a ready-made model and build its own services and agents on top of it, rather than spending resources on training its own model of this caliber from scratch.”

Openness is not just a philosophy, but a practical tool for accelerating innovation. That is why Alliance members are actively developing open-source initiatives, providing the market with ready-made, high-quality solutions.

Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Sberbank:

“Yandex has published over a thousand open-source projects, 52 of which are in the field of ML/AI. Among them are large language models: the Pretrain and Instruct versions of YandexGPT 5 Lite, while T-Technologies (T-Bank) has introduced its T-Lite and T-Pro models—these are open-source Russian-language models with 7 billion and 32 billion parameters, respectively.”

Thus, the Alliance’s commitment to open source is evolving into a real ecosystem where any developer or business can take a ready-made, world-class model and use it as a foundation to create their own services and agents, without having to spend resources on training from scratch.