Canada and Germany fund Bengio's LawZero to build AI without goals of its own

The governments of Canada and Germany committed CAD 150 million and €100 million to LawZero, the Montreal nonprofit founded by the Turing Award-winning researcher Yoshua Bengio. Canada’s AI minister, Evan Solomon, and Germany’s digital minister, Karsten Wildberger, announced the money at the ALL IN conference in Montreal. It was the first federal funding for the organisation, which Bengio launched the previous year, CBC News reported. Together the commitments come to roughly CAD 300 million.

The money is for LawZero’s “Scientist AI”. Unlike frontier systems trained to act autonomously, it is meant to “reason transparently and provide reliable, evidence-based outputs that are not biased by goals of its own”, according to the Canadian government. CBC reported that it could also act as a guardrail on other AI models. The funding covers researchers and engineers, computing capacity and development of the method. The government said it would create 360 full-time jobs in Canada and sovereign computing infrastructure. Solomon framed the investment as building “Canada’s sovereign AI capacity”. Wildberger called it “a novel, mathematically grounded approach: to develop an inherently safe AI.”

The announcement came during a run of warnings from inside the industry about the pace of development, days after Anthropic’s chief executive called for “pacing the frontier”. “I’m doing this with the urgency that I feel in my bones, because I want my children and my grandchildren to have a future,” Bengio said at the conference. CBC noted that Prime Minister Mark Carney had called earlier that week for a global, non-industry body to oversee the technology. Weeks later Carney named Bengio to a new national council advising on Canada’s AI strategy.