Canada and Germany commit up to $300 million to Bengio's LawZero
Canada puts in $150 million and Germany a further €100 million, backing a non-profit pursuing a model designed not to pursue goals of its own.
LawZero, the Montreal non-profit founded by the Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio, has received a joint commitment of up to CAD $300 million from Canada and Germany. Canada is providing $150 million, with a further €100 million from Germany.
The organisation's stated approach is a system it calls Scientist AI, designed to reason transparently and produce evidence-based outputs without pursuing goals of its own. The claim is that reliability can be treated as a capability rather than as a constraint applied afterwards.
The money is intended for the next phase of that work, expanding the research team and securing computing infrastructure. LawZero will open an office in Germany, which turns a nationally based project into one with a presence in both funding jurisdictions.
The bet is unusual for public money. Rather than funding oversight of existing systems, both governments are funding an attempt to build a different kind of system, on the argument that the current architecture is the problem.
Whether that architecture works is unproven. The commitment is on the record from both governments and was reported by CBC, BetaKit and the Globe and Mail.