Yandex Releases Alice AI Foundation, an 80B Model for Commercial Use

Developers can now download and use Yandex’s new Alice AI Foundation model for commercial and research work. The release puts an 80-billion-parameter base model into public reach, while activating 3 billion parameters for each token it processes.

Alice AI Foundation uses a mixture-of-experts design, meaning it has many specialized components but routes each piece of text through only part of the full model. Yandex says the model has 80 billion parameters in total, with 3 billion activated for each token. The company trained it from scratch and says its context window can reach 262,144 tokens, allowing it to take in lengthy inputs.

Yandex also released WikiWebFacts and HardMultiQA, two factual benchmarks focused on Russian-language contexts, along with their evaluation protocols. Its model card says Alice AI Foundation performs on par with larger open-source models on mathematics, coding and other reasoning tasks, and is particularly strong on Russian factual knowledge.

Those comparisons are company-run results. The repository says Yandex used its own internal evaluation infrastructure and specific inference settings for the published tables. That makes the release more useful to developers as a set of weights and reproducible evaluation materials, but it does not turn the reported rankings into an independent assessment.

Yandex plans to use the model as a foundation for future reasoning-model and agent capabilities in its Alice AI product. It also describes Alice AI Foundation as sovereign, but formal status has not yet been assigned: Russia’s framework for sovereign models is still being developed, and registration and status assignments are scheduled to begin March 1, 2027.

The new rules set a higher bar for sovereign models than for national models, including a requirement to rely entirely on domestic components. For now, the concrete change is the open release itself: a public base model, a long context limit and an evaluation package aimed at Russian-language knowledge. Whether it receives the sovereign label will depend on a process that has yet to start.