Russia Identifies Three Key Areas of Cooperation with China on AI

In an interview with the Chinese publication SINA on the sidelines of WAIC 2026, Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Sberbank and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the AI Alliance, outlined three practical areas of cooperation with China where dialogue has moved into the stage of concrete projects.

The first area is education: the parties are developing joint dual-degree programs to train AI engineers. The second is regulation: they are aligning their approaches to standards for accountability and security of artificial intelligence systems. The third area is technological development in the fields of cybersecurity and smart cities, where combining the two countries’ expertise can create synergies.

A. Vedyakhin paid particular attention to the discussion regarding restrictions on access to Chinese AI models. According to him, this trend only confirms the correctness of the Alliance’s strategy, whose members built their own LLMs from scratch as a sovereign technology stack. At the same time, he emphasized that the Russian approach does not entail isolation: the focus on open models is intended to strengthen the ecosystem by giving developers and businesses access to cutting-edge solutions without relying on foreign counterparts.

Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Sberbank and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the AI Alliance:

“We at the Alliance are committed to open source to give developers, researchers, and businesses direct access to a top-tier large model 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 the ready-made flagship model and build their own services and agents on top of it, rather than spending resources training their own model of this caliber from scratch. Moreover, an open model is the most transparent way to prove quality: anyone can test and compare it.”

Thus, at WAIC 2026, Russia is not only demonstrating its technological potential but also offering partners a concrete roadmap for cooperation—from education to joint development—while maintaining openness as a key principle for the development of sovereign AI.