From Scratch, For Whom?
GigaChat 3.1 Ultra and T-pro 2.0 are real domestic builds. The story this quarter isn't the capability gain. It is the distribution strategy.
Russia's labs shipped real home-grown models this quarter, built from scratch rather than relabelled from foreign weights.
The sovereignty narrative around them does not say who the pitch is for, or what it quietly depends on. That gap, not the benchmarks, is the subject of this issue.
Parallel Frontier is a biweekly intelligence report on China's and Russia's AI ecosystems, read in the original. Each issue works a single primary source in the language it was written in, for people who follow these systems professionally and need the source, not a recap. The name nods to 平行智能 (píngxíng zhìnéng, "parallel intelligence"), a real term in Chinese AI research.
The quarter's Russian flagship releases, read from primary sources, are GigaChat 3.1 Ultra, an open mixture-of-experts model (~702B total parameters, ~36B active) trained from scratch on Russian data and released on Hugging Face in November 2025, and T-pro 2.0, the more interesting research contribution, open-weight and built around a Cyrillic-dense tokenizer that lifts the share of Russian words encoded in two tokens or fewer from about 38 percent to about 60 percent, shipped with an instruction corpus, a math benchmark and speculative-decoding weights that make it reproducible, which most Russian releases are not. Yandex is the strongest technical player of the three, with its Alice AI family, YandexGPT 5.1 Pro and an open 8-billion-parameter pretrain, but it is not the state's chosen flag-carrier, a function of its complicated relationship with the Kremlin. Behind them stands Putin's keynote at AI Journey 2025 (Sber headquarters, 19 November 2025), which framed the whole program as a matter of state, technological and, in his phrase, values sovereignty. The verbatim passage runs: «Критическую зависимость от чужих систем мы не можем допустить. Для России это вопрос государственного, технологического и, я бы сказал, ценностного суверенитета.» ("We cannot permit critical dependence on others' systems. For Russia this is a question of state, technological and, I would say, values sovereignty.") In the same speech he said that in certain areas, partly public administration and partly the work of the special services and force agencies, Russia must rely exclusively on its own base developments.
The releases are real, and saying so is the point. They are genuine domestic builds, not relabelled foreign weights. At AI Journey 2025 Herman Gref announced the open release, with full weights, of the flagship (GigaChat 3.1 Ultra, then in preview) and its siblings, GigaChat Lightning, the GigaAMv-3 speech model, and the Kandinsky and Kandinsky 5.0 image and video models, calling it the largest open-source project in Europe. And the benchmarks undercut the capability claim. On cost-adjusted quality the flagship Russian models lag the leading Chinese open models, and this is sourced, not asserted. GigaChat's reasoning mode, added in March 2026, worsened results where precise calculation was needed, by a management-scenario review's account. Sber's own Anton Frolov, who heads its generative-AI development, treats DeepSeek openly as proof that frontier capability no longer needs a trillion-dollar budget.
The narrative around the releases is sovereignty, and the labs' "no foreign base weights" framing is the technical answer to a political instruction. When the capability claim fails, the pitch shifts ground rather than folding. In a Reuters interview ahead of the St Petersburg forum in June 2026, Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin framed the product as slower and not as smart as Anthropic, Grok, or DeepSeek, but aligned with your values, sold to states that want sovereign AI and cannot afford to build it.
Read together, the move is rational. A losing capability position is repositioned as a values-and-residency offer, mirroring China's own Global South open-source play. Putin's keynote supplies the state-level version, an International AI Alliance now 28 organisations strong and a proposal to harmonise AI law with partners through BRICS, the SCO and the EAEU. "Sovereignty" stops being a domestic shield and becomes an export pitch. The irony underneath it is the dependency the pitch omits: Chinese chips, and DeepSeek as the template everyone copies.
For Russia-watchers: judge the program by distribution deals, not benchmarks. The product is sovereignty, and its market is states. For Global South ministries: the pitch's honest content is residency and control, not capability. The dependency it omits prices the sovereignty on offer. For the China–Russia desk: Sber's chip-sourcing is the standing item, and the narrative's silence about it is the signal. Indicators to watch: (1) any Global South state announcing a GigaChat-based national deployment within two quarters, the tripwire in Key Judgment Five, (2) whether the data-localisation requirement dropped from the AI law (Key Judgment Four) returns in secondary regulation, (3) Sber's chip-sourcing for GigaChat, and (4) whether T-pro 2.0's corpus, benchmark and tokenizer work is picked up outside T-Tech. Reproduction is the compliment that counts.
The standing section, on the Russia beat this time, is the same discipline Issue 1 applied to Chinese state text, applied to the two ways Russian sovereign-AI talk is pitched, the one aimed inward, and the export English aimed at everyone else.
The program speaks two scripts. The inward one is Putin's keynote, where critical dependence on foreign systems is unacceptable and own base developments are reserved for administration and the security agencies, paired with the vocabulary written into the AI law: суверенный ИИ ("sovereign AI," fully Russian, the true "from scratch") and национальный ИИ ("national AI," Russian-controlled but permitting foreign open-source components). The outward one is the June 2026 export pitch, sold on values and residency rather than capability.
The offer is sovereignty as a product: values alignment, data residency, independence from the American stack.
What stays in Russian is the vocabulary that reveals what the product is for:
- The keynote's language of unacceptable dependence and own-base-developments-only for the security agencies, an instruction being complied with, not a market being served.
- Суверенный promises fully from scratch. Национальный quietly permits foreign open-source. The export pitch needs a third move (values) because neither domestic term travels.
We assess the export pitch is the domestic mandate translated into marketing. The capability deficit conceded abroad is unsayable at home, where the keynote frames sovereignty as security, and the dependency underneath is unsayable in both. Each version omits what the other requires.
The two quotations doing the load-bearing work are confirmed, Putin's sovereignty passage against the Kremlin transcript of the AI Journey 2025 keynote, and Vedyakhin's concession against the Reuters interview. The AI law's mechanics (Key Judgment Four) are confirmed against the Russian coverage. What remains genuinely forward-looking is the export tripwire in Key Judgment Five.
The ministries this pitch targets will read it in English. What the Russian-language version adds is the pitch's function, compliance with a political instruction, repackaged for export. Reading both is the difference between evaluating a product and evaluating a promise.
- The AI law, softened: the revised bill (Key Judgment Four) takes effect 1 September 2026, and its "sovereign" and "national" categories must respect "traditional spiritual and moral values."
- Sber's chip-sourcing for GigaChat is the standing China–Russia desk item.