Bengio says Canada, Germany investment will support LawZero proof of concept

Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific director of the not-for-profit company LawZero, said a joint investment from Canada and Germany will help the company develop a proof of concept for a new safe-by-design artificial intelligence (AI). On Wednesday, AI Minister Evan Solomon (Toronto Centre, Ont.) announced the funding during the 2026 All In AI and tech conference in Montreal. The bilateral venture will see an investment of $150 million from Canada and €100 million from Germany. During a fireside chat at the conference on Thursday, Larissa Holzki, editorial head of tech for German newspaper Hadelsblatt, asked Bengio what the funding could accomplish, given its small stature compared to the funding of American AI giants. Bengio said it will be enough to help the Montreal-based company demonstrate its Scientist AI methodology, which will be safe-by-design, unlike current frontier models which are designed to act autonomously and pursue objectives. According to Bengio, the LawZero AI would not have its own biased goals, and will be designed to be transparent and provide evidence-based outputs. The difference in achieving this is how the models are trained, he said. In order to demonstrate the methodology, Bengio pointed out the company won’t need to be on the same funding scale as trillion dollar models. The company can train smaller models, or fine tune open-weight models with its training procedure, he said, which will not cost as much. If Bengio and his team can prove their methodology is successful, expanding that work will require much more funding. “If it works, then, somehow, it’ll take much more money to bring that to scale,” he said. “So there would be some other organizations commercializing this kind of thing, or maybe the existing labs would want to be using something like this.” According to a government press release, the investment seeks “to develop a fundamentally new form of advanced AI, designed to be trustworthy, safe and capable. This joint investment further strengthens cooperation between Canada and Germany on AI.” Earlier this year, Canada and Germany signed a joint declaration on AI and launched the Sovereign Technology Alliance to strengthen cooperation with “trusted partners.” The LawZero project is set to create 360 full-time jobs in Canada. The German funding is subject to notification by the European Commission and “will support research and development being undertaken at LawZero’s new German office,” the press release said. Bengio pointed out the lack of regulation in the AI sphere, and argued tech companies, like any other industry, should be required to prove their potentially dangerous product is safe before they build it. “In other words, the burden of proof is on the side of the companies. And then the auditors come to check that the demonstration, the empirical validation, the theory is scientifically valid.” “You don’t say, ‘Oh, I’m going to build a bridge and we’ll see if it works.’” mcollins@thewirereport.ca

Bengio says Canada, Germany investment will support LawZero proof of concept

Regulatory |
By Maria Collins
|September 18, 2026

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Bengio says Canada, Germany investment will support LawZero proof of concept

Regulatory | By Maria Collins |September 18, 2026

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