Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov said the course will become mandatory for all Russian schoolchildren from grades 5 to 11 starting in September of the next academic year, Interfax reported. A pilot stage will launch earlier, in the second quarter of the current academic year, at 1,000 schools, including in the Republic of Tatarstan.

Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that the Education Ministry plans to introduce the course from January 2027. Classes will be added to the schedule by analogy with the "Conversations about Important Things" sessions held at the start of each school week.

Students will be taught about how AI works and its applications in science, medicine, ecology, education and industry. Some lessons will be devoted to information security, countering online fraud and the risks of using the technology. According to Kravtsov, textbooks for the course are already being prepared.

Agentstvo found that the websites of several schools in three different regions carried work programs for the course that were identical in content. Two of the documents state they were drawn up on the basis of a 2024 program from the Institute for Content and Teaching Methods.

According to those documents, ninth-graders will learn to develop Telegram bots as part of the course, in a module titled "Some Programming Techniques for Working with Artificial Intelligence." The program describes creating a simple bot, expanding its functionality and creating a bot with the help of AI.

Russian authorities had blocked Telegram almost completely by April of this year. A stable connection to the messenger is possible only using tools that circumvent the blocks, and the authorities have stepped up their fight against VPNs with new waves of blocking.

According to a draft budget for 2027-2029, textbooks for the course will be purchased and supplied by the "My History" Foundation for the Support of the Humanities, which is linked to Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), who has been described as "Putin's confessor."

The Education Ministry first announced the introduction of the course in September.