The chief executive of Canada’s largest artificial intelligence company spent Monday rejecting a proposal from the world’s biggest AI labs to slow the pace of development, arguing the plan would hand the firms already leading the market the power to write the rules everyone else has to follow.
Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez set out the argument in a post on the Toronto company’s website titled “Who gets to define the rules for AI,” which BetaKit reported Monday likened the proposal to creating a “state-sanctioned cartel.” Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst endorsed the post on X.
The proposal Gomez is answering came from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose essay “We Must Pace the Frontier” was published over the weekend. Amodei calls for a global slowdown in AI development, citing risks including losing control of AI systems and the misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and argues that recursive self-improvement, where AI systems design or train their own successors, must be “pursued very carefully, if at all,” Reason reported Monday. Amodei’s plan has three parts: embedded third-party evaluators with ongoing access to models and safety practices, coordination among frontier labs in democratic countries on common standards, and government efforts to extend that coordination internationally. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and xAI’s Elon Musk all backed the call, according to Reason.
Gomez has not disputed that the technology is dangerous. He told CNBC’s “The Tech Download” that current models are the most potent cyber weapon ever created, because of how effectively they find and exploit vulnerabilities at scale. His disagreement is about the remedy, and about who administers it.
What has gone largely unremarked is that Canada has no binding AI law of its own to bring to that argument. The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, the AI portion of Bill C-27, died when Parliament was prorogued in January 2025, and no successor bill has been tabled since. What governs AI in Canada today is a patchwork: federal privacy law, Quebec’s Law 25, sector-specific directives covering areas such as financial services and federal procurement, and a voluntary code of conduct for generative AI administered by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.
That matters for the fight Gomez picked. Ottawa’s most recent AI governance instrument, the Responsible Data Centre Development Principles announced last week, works the same way. BetaKit reported it drew 23 signatories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere itself, voluntarily agreeing to standards they helped shape. The mechanism Gomez objects to at the global level, where the largest firms set terms that smaller builders inherit, is close to the mechanism Canada currently relies on at home, by default rather than by design.
Gomez’s position is also not a disinterested one, and it is worth saying so plainly. Cohere sells enterprise AI to customers running models on private data inside their own systems, and it does not operate at the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic. A standards regime pegged to the frontier and negotiated by the largest labs would fall hardest on companies trying to sell near-frontier systems without that scale. That does not make the objection wrong, and Gomez is not alone in making it. Venture capitalist David Sacks responded to the slowdown call by writing, “Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel,” Reason reported.
Speaking Monday at the Canadian Global Growth Forum in conversation with Inovia Capital partner Chris Arsenault, Gomez said Canada is “very well positioned to become a superpower in data centres” if it can address public concerns about water use, energy consumption and emissions. “We have many strengths in terms of data centres: we have a cold climate with the second-largest landmass of any country in the world,” he said, according to BetaKit. “We have space, we have clean energy.” Market research firm Mordor Intelligence puts Canada’s data centre market near $19 billion and expects it to nearly double by 2031, BetaKit reported. That is the buildout Ottawa spent this week selling to foreign investors. The rules governing what runs on it are still being written somewhere else.
Reporting on Gomez’s remarks and blog post via BetaKit. Reporting on Amodei’s essay and the responses to it via Reason.
