Ottawa is putting $150 million into LawZero, the Montreal non-profit founded by AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, as part of a combined package with Germany worth roughly $300 million to build what the organization calls a safer, non-agentic alternative to today’s AI systems, the federal government announced Sept. 16, 2026.
The funding, drawn from Canada’s Strategic Response Fund, was unveiled alongside a German commitment of 100 million euros at the ALL IN technology conference in Montreal, according to a joint statement from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. Germany’s contribution is still subject to notification under European Commission state-aid rules.
LawZero, which Bengio launched in June 2025 and which is now led by chief executive Sam Ramadori, a former BrainBox AI executive, is developing what it calls “Scientist AI,” a system designed to monitor and constrain other AI models rather than pursue goals of its own. The approach is meant to reason transparently and produce evidence-based outputs, in contrast to the increasingly autonomous, goal-directed systems that have raised alarms among some researchers over deception and self-preservation behaviour, according to the government release and LawZero’s own materials.
“If one day (AI) gets to be smarter than us, it’s essential we have the technology so AI serves us, not the other way around,” Bengio said in a statement. “I’m doing this with an urgency I feel in my bones.”
AI Minister Evan Solomon said the investment is meant to ensure advanced AI is “developed responsibly and in ways that benefit Canadians,” while officials said the funding is expected to support roughly 360 full-time jobs in Canada, the opening of a LawZero office in Berlin, and a sovereign computing partnership with Canadian data-centre firms Hypertec and 5C.
The announcement lands three months after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government unveiled its “AI for All” strategy in June, which pledged more than $2 billion toward AI adoption and a goal of 250,000 AI-related jobs by 2031. That earlier rollout drew criticism for offering few concrete safety measures. Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman said at the time that “the safety and the security that was promised in this is nowhere to be found” in the strategy documents. The LawZero funding is among the government’s most specific AI-safety commitments since.
Even so, researchers who study AI policy say the investment is no guarantee of results. Jaxson Khan, a fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, told CBC News there is “no silver bullet to this problem right now” and that Canada has limited leverage over the direction of frontier AI development set largely by American and Chinese labs. Khan nonetheless called the LawZero bet “a worthwhile investment” and “a good partnership.” Vass Bednar of the Canadian Shield Institute said the funding should be seen as capacity-building rather than a fix, arguing Canada “can’t fall victim to the inevitability of the technology or its harms.”
For Canadian AI researchers and the broader tech sector, the deal signals that Ottawa is willing to back domestic safety research with real money rather than only regulation, at a moment when the country’s AI ambitions are being measured against both job-creation targets and warnings from economists that automation could displace hundreds of thousands of workers by the end of the decade. Whether a Montreal-based non-profit can meaningfully shape how the world’s largest AI labs build their systems remains, as Khan put it, an open question with no easy answer.
