The Ministry of Digital Development, together with market participants, is finalizing a draft government decree establishing the rules for Yandex's AI assistant "Alisa AI" after its pre-installation on smartphones and other devices. The document provides for expanding the assistant's capabilities, and the application itself is proposed to be made undeletable, similar to RuStore. The department expects to ensure equal competitive conditions for Russian and foreign solutions, while market participants insist on additional refinement of the project and its public discussion.

Currently, similar rules apply to the Russian search engine. The new version of the document proposes to separately enshrine rules for programs of the "system assistant" class. At the same time, the term "voice assistant" is proposed to be replaced by a broader concept – "a program functioning based on artificial intelligence technologies," or a system assistant.

The list of mandatory pre-installed programs also proposes to include an application containing an AI model with the status of a national large fundamental model or a sovereign large fundamental model.

Separately, the rules for deleting pre-installed programs are changing. Currently, an exception applies to programs designed for searching and acquiring applications, i.e., app stores. Now, it is proposed to add a system assistant to them – the user will not be able to delete it.

At the same time, the assistant is intended to be granted "all special permissions." This refers to automatic updates, background services for sending push notifications, voice activation, and other features.

The law on mandatory pre-installation of domestic software has been in force in Russia since 2021

The list approved by the government for 2027 includes Yandex Browser, Mail.ru Mail, Max messenger, and other applications.

The smartphone market in Russia remains large: according to M.Video, from January to September 2026, 14.4 million smartphones worth 370 billion rubles were sold in the country. For the entire year 2025, according to M.Video and Fplus, sales amounted to 24.2 million devices.

Alisa AI itself is already gaining an audience. Yandex reported that in September, its number of users grew fivefold year-on-year, and its weekly audience reached 41 million people.

Yandex supported both the work of the Ministry of Digital Development and the industry's position on the need for equal conditions for Russian and foreign services. The company also stated that it regularly participates in adapting new models of mobile devices from foreign brands.

The Ministry of Digital Development emphasized that it continues to discuss the project with market participants. At the same time, the department proceeds from the assumption that the use of a system assistant by the device owner should remain voluntary. According to the ministry's position, the new rules should ensure equal competitive conditions for domestic and foreign solutions.

VK, the developer of the Marusya voice assistant, declined to comment.

Experts on the rules being developed

An IT market participant, whose opinion is cited by Kommersant, believes that the project is being created as a measure to support Russian developers of large fundamental AI models. At the same time, the institution of a system assistant itself is new even for software pre-installation rules.

The RATEX Association opposed some of the proposals. It requested to suspend work on the project until a full regulatory impact assessment and public discussion. The association points out that the devices and operating systems themselves are manufactured and developed outside of Russia. Therefore, in their opinion, it is necessary to separately study how foreign OS work and how system access is provided in them.

RATEX also believes that manufacturers need to be given time to adapt production lines. The association proposes to postpone the entry into force of the new requirements by at least five months from the official inclusion of the system assistant in the list of pre-installed software.