Minakov worked on the technical side of Revizor, an automated system that verifies whether Russian internet providers block sites listed in the registers of prohibited resources, according to The Bell. In 2017 he was acting head of the internet resource monitoring department at the Information Technology Directorate of the management staff of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise RChTs TsFO, and later headed the experimental works unit at the science and technology center of the Main Radio Frequency Center (GRChTs), the report said.
His LinkedIn profile indicates he left GRChTs in 2023. He now heads the development division at GlavNIVTs, an IT integrator subordinate to the administration of the Russian president, according to the outlet. Meduza reported that this structure developed the Sherlock data-lookup service and is responsible for a facial-recognition video surveillance system. Minakov is also listed as digital transformation director at the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, whose supervisory board is chaired by Vladimir Putin.
Advertising for AIVPN appeared online in spring 2026. The service is marketed as a tool that can disguise VPN traffic as ordinary application protocols — WebRTC, QUIC, DNS-over-UDP — so that deep packet inspection (DPI) systems do not recognize it.
Rostov-on-Don IT entrepreneur Oleg Kirichenko calls himself the creator of AIVPN. He now lives in Turkey and works on artificial intelligence projects. According to The Bell's count using the Claude neural network, in release 1.1.0 Minakov accounts for 325 of roughly 560 commits and about 88% of the source code lines — around 141,000 of 161,000. He owns most of the key components: the server and client parts, the library with the protocol, cryptography and traffic-masking engine, and most of the clients for Linux, Windows, Android, iOS and macOS.
Kirichenko told The Bell he met Minakov through GitHub when the latter sent a request to contribute changes to the project code. He said he checked Minakov's place of work, but Minakov replied that he no longer worked at Roskomnadzor. Kirichenko also said he has no time to actively work on the project.
Minakov confirmed to The Bell that he took part in developing AIVPN. He explained his interest by problems with the stability of traffic transmission: according to him, "even linking two data centers is sometimes a task," and the AIVPN protocol makes it possible. Minakov stressed that the project is not connected to his main job, has no political or commercial component, and that circumventing blocks is "only one of the possible scenarios" for its use. Anyone can check the code, he added.
Sarkis Darbinyan, co-founder of RKS Global and legal adviser to the VPN Guild, told The Bell that a cursory analysis found "nothing of the sort" in the code. Still, he noted, Minakov's professional background means the project raises concerns.
Mikhail Klimarev, author of the ZaTelecom Telegram channel, said he would not install such software on his devices under any circumstances. IT expert Filipp Kulin, who has known Minakov since his time at GRChTs, called him an "honest Z-patriot." Kulin considers the AIVPN concept detached from reality: in his view, the issue is not protocol masking but available hosting providers, half of which Roskomnadzor can slow down.