AI giant Anthropic is investing in Canadian research through partnerships with leading universities and the nation’s federally backed AI institutes.
“Access to Anthropic’s models is a powerful accelerant for the work being carried out across Mila’s research community.”
Hugo Larochelle, Mila
Anthropic announced on Tuesday that it is committing $10 million CAD to fund research into “beneficial and responsible applications of AI.” Though the exact funding breakdown was not immediately clear, the company said it’s partnering with Edmonton’s Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), Montréal’s Mila, and Toronto’s Vector Institute, as well as CHEO, The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Université Laval, University of Toronto (UofT), and the University of Saskatchewan—with more to be announced.
Across the universities, the company is providing credits for its widely used AI model, Claude, to support research and engineering. Amii, Mila, and Vector are also joining the Anthropic for Startups program, which could offer Canadian startups more Claude credits and resources.
“Access to Anthropic’s models is a powerful accelerant for the work being carried out across Mila’s research community,” Mila scientific director Hugo Larochelle said in a statement.
In a blog post announcing the funding, Anthropic noted that the University of Toronto and Université de Montréal led research into neural networks—which underpin today’s generative AI systems—and researchers at the University of Alberta made headway in reinforcement learning.
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Chris Olah, a Canadian researcher and Anthropic’s co-founder, said in a statement that the foundations of modern AI came from Toronto, Montréal, and Edmonton. “I was formed by that culture, and I’m proud Anthropic can support the next chapter,” he said.
The news comes as the Canadian government has said AI sovereignty is a pillar of its national AI strategy, which seeks to support domestic AI companies and help them scale up. The feds were granted access to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview model in early June, before the US instated a foreign-access ban, then lifted restrictions.
Feature image courtesy Anthropic via Flickr. Image license under CC BY 2.0.