---
title: Canada and Germany Commit Up to $300 Million to Yoshua Bengio's AI Safety Lab
description: Canada and Germany committed up to $300 million to LawZero, Yoshua Bengio's Montreal AI safety lab building non-agentic Scientist AI.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-09-17T18:58:15.659Z
updated: 2026-09-17T18:58:15.667Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/canada-germany-300m-lawzero-bengio-ai-safety
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/yoshua-bengio-lawzero-5260.webp
categories: Artificial Intelligence
content_type: Analysis
region: Global
publication: Sovereign Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

Canada and Germany committed up to $300 million to LawZero, the Montreal AI safety non-profit led by Yoshua Bengio, at the ALL IN conference in Montreal on 17 September 2026. It is the largest government commitment to AI safety research to date, and the first at this scale to back a lab that is refusing to build the autonomous, goal-seeking systems most of the industry is now chasing.

Canada is providing CAD $150 million through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and Germany €100 million. Germany's contribution is subject to notification by the European Commission, so the full amount is not yet guaranteed. Evan Solomon, Canada's Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, and Melanie Joly, the Minister of Industry, announced the Canadian share, while Dr Karsten Wildberger, Germany's Federal Minister for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, committed the German side.

## Bengio's Lab Builds AI Without Goals of Its Own

LawZero is a not-for-profit headquartered in Montreal, developing what it describes as a new approach to advanced AI designed to be trustworthy, transparent and safe by design. Bengio founded it and leads it scientifically.

LawZero's flagship approach is [Scientist AI](https://lawzero.org/en/news/lawzero-receives-commitment-300m-joint-funding-canada-and-germany), a system built not to act on its own. Unlike current frontier systems, which LawZero says are designed to act autonomously and pursue their own goals, Scientist AI is made to reason transparently and provide reliable, evidence-based outputs that are not biased by goals of its own.

LawZero launched on 3 June 2025 with US $30 million in philanthropic contributions from backers including Jaan Tallinn, a founding engineer of Skype, former Google chief Eric Schmidt, Open Philanthropy and the Future of Life Institute. Bengio shared the 2018 A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, founded the Mila artificial intelligence institute in Quebec, and is the first living scientist to pass one million citations on Google Scholar.

## Safety Money Stays a Fraction of Capability Spending

Government and philanthropic money for AI safety together runs to a few hundred million dollars a year, while the largest AI labs spend on the order of tens of billions on computing power alone.

Governments have backed AI-safety work before, though through public institutes rather than independent labs. Britain created an AI Safety Institute, one of several bodies that now coordinate through an International Network of AI Safety Institutes spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Japan and Singapore. The LawZero commitment stands out for its size and for backing a single independent lab.

The money comes as the wider AI market shifts toward agentic systems, autonomous software that acts and pursues goals on a user's behalf, the opposite of the design choice LawZero has made. Whether a non-agentic system can meet the demand for AI that acts on its own is an open question, and one the two governments are now funding LawZero to answer.

## FAQ

**Q: What is Scientist AI?**
It is LawZero's flagship approach to building AI. LawZero says that unlike current frontier systems, which are designed to act on their own and pursue their own goals, Scientist AI is made to reason transparently and give reliable, evidence-based outputs that are not driven by goals of its own.

**Q: What will LawZero do with the funding?**
LawZero says it will expand into Europe with a new office in Berlin and build a dedicated, sovereign compute infrastructure in Canada with the Canadian partners Hypertec and 5C.

**Q: Who oversees LawZero?**
Yoshua Bengio founds and scientifically leads it. LawZero says it is governed by an independent board of directors and a global advisory council whose members include board chair Maria Eitel, former prime ministers Jacinda Ardern and Stefan Lofven, and the author Yuval Noah Harari.

**Q: Is the full $300 million guaranteed?**
Not yet. Canada is providing CAD $150 million and Germany €100 million, but the German share is subject to notification by the European Commission, a clearance step that must happen before that portion can be paid.