Grigorenko: Russian companies invested over 250 billion rubles in AI, but the sector has no rules

Russian market for AI has already moved beyond the pilot stage: according to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko, in 2025 companies invested over 250 billion rubles in implementing such technologies. But the sector is growing faster than legislation: Russian law still does not have even an established definition of "artificial intelligence".

Scale of Business Investments

The amount announced at the Data Fusion conference is important not only for the figure itself. We're talking not about theoretical interest in the topic, but about money that business is already directing toward practical implementation of AI in processes, products, and services. When the market reaches hundreds of billions of rubles, it means that artificial intelligence for companies stops being a PR story and becomes a separate line item in the budget.

What specific industries contributed the bulk of these investments has not been disclosed, but the figure itself breaks down quite logically. Some budget goes to models, cloud services, and computing; some goes to integration with existing systems, automation of internal processes, analytics, customer services, and security. In other words, business is paying not only for experiments, but also for complex infrastructure without which AI does not work in real-world scenarios.

A Market Without Rules

Against this backdrop, another statement stands out particularly: there is still no separate legal definition of AI in Russian legislation. This does not mean that there is no law around the technology at all — companies are still obligated to comply with regulations on personal data, trade secrets, intellectual property, and industry-specific requirements. But special rules for AI that would establish general frameworks have not yet been developed.

Because of this, the market operates in interpretation mode. Some companies view AI as ordinary software, others as a special tool with elevated risks. Questions of responsibility, transparency, auditing, permissible data use, and system performance requirements often have to be resolved through internal policies, contracts, and careful legal formulations rather than through unified standards.

"Business invested over 250 billion rubles in implementing AI in 2025."

Where the Gap Emerges

The gap between the volume of investments and the absence of a separate legal framework is already affecting the market in very practical ways.

• Companies have to implement AI faster than clear regulatory guidelines emerge.
• Customers and suppliers interpret differently what counts as an AI system versus ordinary automation.
• In contracts it is harder to distribute responsibility in advance for model errors, response quality, and data use.
• Large organizations have to create their own internal rules to reduce legal and reputational risks.
• The more money flowing into the market, the stronger the demand for unified terminology, standards, and verification procedures.

For business, this creates an ambiguous situation. On the one hand, the absence of strict special regulation allows projects to launch faster and not wait for formal permissions. On the other hand, the deeper AI goes into core processes, the more expensive uncertainty becomes.

The logical next step for the market and the state is to agree at least on basic definitions and responsibility boundaries, so that large investments do not run up against legal ambiguity. This is most noticeable where AI affects not auxiliary functions but decisions with financial, operational, or reputational consequences. The closer the model gets to customer communications, documents, scoring, security, or internal controls, the higher the cost of an error.

That is why the regulation question for large companies already looks not academic but quite practical.

What This Means

The Russian AI market is already operating with large sums of money but still works without a separate legal framework. The main intrigue now is not whether companies will continue to invest, but whether the rules of the game will catch up with the scale of implementation.