Pro-AIPerson

Vladimir Putin

President of Russia

Russian president who declared in 2017 that whoever leads in AI “will become the ruler of the world,” and has since decreed a national generative-AI strategy and an AI alliance with China to break what he calls a dangerous Western monopoly.

Politician

Wikipedia CNN on the 2017 remarks

In his words

Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind… Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.

— CNN, 2017

Biography

Vladimir Putin (born 1952) has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 1999. He supplied the AI arms-race discourse with its founding quotation: speaking to schoolchildren in Yaroslavl on September 1, 2017, he said AI comes with “colossal opportunities” and hard-to-predict threats, and that the nation that leads it will rule the world — a line Elon Musk immediately amplified as a warning about AI-driven war.

Against the “alien” models

Putin’s stance hardened into industrial policy after ChatGPT. At Sberbank’s AI Journey conference in November 2023 he denounced Western generative models as biased systems that “ignore and cancel” Russian culture, declared their monopoly unacceptable and dangerous, and announced a decree updating Russia’s national AI strategy with expanded research into generative AI and large language models. State champions Sberbank (GigaChat) and Yandex carry the effort, and at the December 2024 AI Journey conference he ordered the government and Sberbank to deepen AI cooperation with China.

The gap between rhetoric and capacity is wide: sanctions have cut Russia off from advanced chips, much of its AI talent emigrated after the invasion of Ukraine, and independent rankings place Russia far behind the U.S. and China. His embrace of AI is also inseparable from its military uses — drone autonomy on the Ukrainian front — and from information control at home, making him a case study in AI enthusiasm without AI liberalism.