Federal Law No. 243-FZ, Article 8, Duties of Sovereign and National Foundation Model Developers
Federal Law No. 243-FZ, Art. 8 (26 July 2026)
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force in 166 days, effective 1 March 2027.
An AI governance rule binding private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Once Article 8 of Federal Law No. 243-FZ takes effect on 1 March 2027: if you develop a sovereign or national large foundation AI model, take organizational and technical measures to secure it, define operating rules covering restrictions, conditions of use, updates, and decommissioning, and maintain technical documentation of its key parameters and limitations sufficient to assess the safety of its application.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureNo
What it reaches
Obligation class
Governance
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Not yet binding: Article 8 of Federal Law No. 243-FZ, signed 26 July 2026, does not take effect until 1 March 2027.
Once in force, it will require the developer of a 'sovereign' or 'national' large foundation AI model to take organizational and technical measures to secure the model, to define rules for the model's operation including restrictions, conditions of use, updating, and decommissioning, and to maintain technical documentation describing the model's key parameters and limitations to the extent needed to assess the safety of its application.
A 'developer' for these purposes is an individual entrepreneur or a legal entity that designs, trains, or modifies the model.
Per Article 6 (also deferred to 1 March 2027 for these definitional parts), a 'sovereign' model must be developed, with its characteristics determined and changed at every lifecycle stage, by a Russian legal entity, with the whole development cycle including training fully technically reproducible by that developer, user-query processing and data storage kept in Russian-located, Russian-owned data centers, and confirmed compliance with Russian legislation and 'traditional Russian spiritual and moral values'.
A 'national' model shares the same developer-control, data-center, and compliance-confirmation requirements, but may incorporate components developed abroad, including other developers' foundation models, provided they are distributed under an open license.
When LexLint raises it
trains_models
Read the law
Consultant.ru, codified text of Federal Law No. 243-FZ, Art. 8