When Western governments set out to throttle Russia's access to advanced technology, the expectation was clear enough: over time, the country would slip quietly to the margins of the digital economy and Moscow would be left consuming yesterday's algorithms while the rest of the world moved on.
That is not what AI Journey 2025 looked like.
The tenth anniversary of Russia's flagship artificial intelligence conference was never going to be a modest affair. In Moscow, the country's largest bank, Sber, now a fully-fledged technology group, used the event to parade an ecosystem that many in the West had assumed would be impossible under sanctions: large language models trained on domestic data, industrial-grade robotics and a new generation of "intelligent" devices built almost entirely on a Russian stack.
