What was announced
The governments of Canada and Germany have committed up to CAD $300 million to LawZero, the Montréal-based AI safety non-profit founded by Yoshua Bengio. The funding was announced on Wednesday at the ALL IN conference in Montréal, LawZero said in a release. The Globe and Mail reported that each country will contribute up to C$150 million in grant funding.
The figures are ceilings. Neither the release nor the published reports gave a timetable for when the money will be paid out.
LawZero said the money will fund the next phase of its technical roadmap: a larger international research team, a new office in Berlin, and dedicated, sovereign compute infrastructure in Canada built with the Canadian companies Hypertec and 5C. The Logic reported that the non-profit will spend the grants on R&D and on compute from a new cluster that Hypertec and 5C will build for it.
What LawZero is building
Bengio, a Turing Award winner, launched LawZero in June 2025, according to BetaKit. It was incubated at Mila, the Québec AI institute. The Globe reported that it employs close to 50 people and started with close to US$30 million in philanthropic funding. The release lists backers including the Gates Foundation, Schmidt Sciences, the Future of Life Institute and NVIDIA.
Its main project is called Scientist AI. LawZero describes it as a system being developed to reason transparently and give evidence-based outputs without goals of its own, unlike current frontier systems designed to act autonomously. The organisation says it expects Scientist AI to provide guardrails for today’s frontier models. Bengio told the Globe that the first priority is a monitor that would stop other AI agents from taking harmful actions, and that the approach will not use reinforcement learning. The Logic reported that LawZero plans to sell Scientist AI as a guardrail for commercial AI tools.
What the ministers said
“This backing from Canada and Germany is a defining moment, moving us into the next phase of developing safe AI,” Bengio said in the release.
Karsten Wildberger, Germany’s Federal Minister for Digitalisation and Government Modernisation, said: “With ‘Scientist AI’, we are deepening the proven partnership between Canada and Germany.” Evan Solomon, Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, said the investment would strengthen the country’s sovereign AI capacity. Mélanie Joly, the Minister of Industry, said it would build domestic capacity and support good jobs.
LawZero’s president, Sam Ramadori, told The Logic in July that the organisation needed more money to build its tools and pay for the computing power to train them. Bengio told the Globe that LawZero is in talks with other countries about further funding.
Why it matters
The commitment puts two governments directly behind an alternative way of building AI, not only behind rules for the systems that already exist. Bengio told the Globe that government-backed work of this kind lets countries other than the US and China, which dominate the field, help shape the technology.
On the same day, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in her State of the Union address that the EU would work with partners such as Canada and the UK on model evaluation, verification and AI security.
What to watch
How quickly the money reaches LawZero, when the Berlin office opens and when the Hypertec and 5C compute comes online. None of these has a published date.
