Canada and Germany each announced a $150 million investment in LawZero, bringing their combined funding to $300 million. The Montréal-based not-for-profit AI startup, founded by Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, is developing a new approach to advanced AI designed to be safe and capable.
The announcement was made at ALL IN 2026, a two-day AI event being held in Montréal on September 16–17.
ALL IN 2026 is bringing together more than 6,500 AI leaders, with 2,500-plus companies represented, more than 100 Canadian AI startups and over 200 speakers from more than 40 countries, according to the event organizers.
The investment comes amid growing debate over increasingly autonomous AI systems, with recent incidents involving OpenAI and Anthropic models intensifying questions over safety safeguards, cybersecurity risks and how advanced AI should be developed and controlled.
Evan Solomon, Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, said the investment would strengthen Canada’s sovereign AI capacity. He said Canada’s future in artificial intelligence depends on developing advanced systems that reflect its values and protect its interests.
“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,” Solomon said.
AI systems become more powerful, we cannot afford to treat safety as an afterthought.
Today, Canada and Germany each announced a $150 million investment in LawZero, the AI safety organization founded by Yoshua Bengio, one of Canada’s great scientists.
Canada helped lead the… pic.twitter.com/TddY2cYYS1
— Evan Solomon (@EvanLSolomon) September 16, 2026
LawZero’s flagship approach, Scientist AI, treats reliability as a core capability and aims to develop AI that is trustworthy and safe from inception. According to LawZero, it is being developed to reason transparently and provide reliable, evidence-based outputs without pursuing goals of its own, unlike current frontier AI systems designed to act autonomously and pursue their own goals.
The organization said Scientist AI could serve as a safety guardrail for today’s frontier AI models. Bengio said AI safety must be central to the development of advanced AI systems.
“Recent events demonstrate that safety is itself a core capability: scientific innovation and public safety can and must advance together,” said Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director, LawZero.
At LawZero, we’re rethinking the building blocks of frontier AI to create an intelligent machine that is both highly capable and safe-by-design. We’re excited to share our first blog post outlining some of the objectives and core components of our Scientist AI project. 🧵
(1/4)— LawZero – LoiZéro (@LawZero_) February 5, 2026
The funding will support the next phase of LawZero’s technical roadmap, including the expansion of its international scientific research team and development of advanced computing infrastructure.
The investment will also enable the startup to expand into Europe with the establishment of an office in Berlin, Germany. As part of its expansion, LawZero will establish dedicated sovereign computing infrastructure in Canada in partnership with Canadian companies Hypertec and 5C.
The collaboration will provide LawZero with the computing capacity required to pursue its research at scale while anchoring critical AI infrastructure, expertise and capabilities in Canada.
German Federal Minister for Digitalization and Government Modernization Karsten Wildberger said the Scientist AI initiative would deepen the Canada-Germany partnership and advance an “inherently safe” approach to AI.
Also Read: David Sacks Upholds Zuckerberg’s Approach: Don’t Call on Others, AI Safety is Routine Work
