LawZero lands $300M from Canada and Germany for safer AI

MONTREAL — LawZero, the non-profit founded by Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, secured $300 million CAD from the Canadian and German governments to advance “safe AI for humanity,” announcing the backing Wednesday at Montréal’s ALL IN conference.

The money will fund the next phase of LawZero’s technical roadmap: growing its international research team, opening a Berlin office, and standing up dedicated sovereign compute in Canada with data-centre partners Hypertec and 5C so critical infrastructure and expertise stay anchored at home. LawZero, incubated at Mila, is building “Scientist AI” — systems meant to monitor and put guardrails on agentic models — after launching in June 2025 on evidence that frontier systems show deception, self-preservation and goal misalignment. It is structured as a non-profit to limit market and government pressures that could compromise safety work.

“By investing in homegrown innovation like Scientist AI, we are strengthening Canada’s sovereign AI capacity and ensuring that the next generation of AI is built safely, responsibly, and on Canadian terms,” AI Minister Evan Solomon said. Bengio said that as risks multiply, the priority is building solutions people can trust: “Recent events demonstrate that safety is itself a core capability: scientific innovation and public safety can and must advance together.”

Public money for AI babysitters is an inflation story about catastrophic-risk insurance: either Canada pays now for safer stacks, or it pays later in cyber losses, regulatory freezes and capital flight when frontier systems fail in the wild.