Russia’s AI Law Puts Control Ahead of Capability | TechPolicy.Press

Russia has adopted an AI law, and TechPolicy.Press has reached an unusually blunt verdict: it puts control ahead of capability. The statute runs to thirteen articles. Thirteen — short enough to read over a long lunch, which is presumably the design. The vocabulary is lifted wholesale from contemporary AI regulation, the way a pub borrows a gastropub menu: identical words, entirely different kitchen. What has actually happened is that the familiar categories have been quietly re-pointed, welding regulation onto industrial policy and technological sovereignty until nobody can tell the compliance department from the growth strategy.

Here is the elegant bit: those thirteen articles do not, as yet, regulate very much at all. Important implementation details are left to subsequent government rules, which is the legislative equivalent of promising to read the terms and conditions later, having already clicked accept. Several major provisions do not take effect until March 1, 2027, handing everyone a generous runway to lobby, pre-position, and discover that the genuinely interesting decisions were always going to be made by whoever answered the phone in the meantime. Sovereignty, as ever, is a lovely word for delegation.

That borrowed vocabulary is the con. It flatters every regulator who has spent three years drafting transparency clauses while the machinery underneath does something else entirely — deciding who gets to train models, who gets to import them, and who gets told the rules changed overnight in a document nobody stood for election over. Regulation-as-industrial-policy does not measure capability; it measures access. So keep an eye on March 2027 the way you would keep an eye on a delayed train: it will turn up, it will be technically on schedule, and by then the passengers will have been quietly sorted into carriages.