Anthropic—a company valued at more than $1 trillion CAD—announced this week it will invest $10 million in Canadian research. That is, to quote Vass Bednar, managing director of think tank Canadian Shield Institute, if you count Claude credits as investment.
The US AI giant said it chose to offer Claude coupons to Canadian institutions because Canadians were leaders in early AI research; the company is betting we’ll continue that leadership toward future breakthroughs. They’re also likely betting that by building those breakthroughs with Claude, institutions will get locked into using their product.
Bednar isn’t alone in probing the difference between investing to build up Canadian industry, or ensuring that industry is hooked on Anthropic’s products. One tech executive, Klick’s Simon Smith, questioned how useful frontier model credits are to researchers, given that Claude prohibits competing model development. As Hugging Face data shows, research is increasingly moving away from frontier to open source, allowing users to have ownership over their tools and not pay out the nose for credits.
What might be more useful, Smith suggested, would be for Anthropic to found its own research lab in Canada. We did learn about a new research lab being founded this week, but one built on homegrown, Canadian talent. Richard Sutton’s—one of those early leaders Anthropic cited—new lab has the lofty goal of creating artificial general intelligence that runs on as little power as a few lightbulbs. Whether Canada’s investment landscape is pointed toward creating more pioneers like Sutton, or simply power users, remains an open question.
Sarah Rieger,
Managing Editor
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Latest news across tech
Make no mistake
Who is responsible for mistakes in AI news summaries? In Germany, a state regulator said that Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity AI are subject to media laws, Reuters reports, and a lower court ruled that AI companies are liable for inaccuracies. It sets a notable precedent as more and more Canadians read Google’s AI summaries but skip the actual news articles.
Secretly Canadian
“When a Silicon Valley company sets out to make [an AI model] perfectly polite, universally tolerant, highly trusting of institutions, and afraid of ever saying anything too extreme, it may end up building a Canadian by accident.” That’s how Transformer Labs describes the findings of its recent study. The team behind the open-source research tool tested leading LLM outputs against a global study of “cultural values”—and found that, despite being majority US-built, US-trained tools, outputs were more in line with how Canadians tend to speak.
Palantir procurement
Canada’s military is paying Palantir $7.4 million per year. The contract, IJF reports, was not advertised because the government claimed it “inadvertently omitted” posting it. In a manifesto this spring, the US firm argued that it has an “obligation” to defend the US; one cybersecurity expert called the relationship concerning, given that Canadian firms could provide the same services.
Palantir is not the only foreign firm benefiting from Canadian procurement; The Logic reports that 70 percent of so-called “Buy Canadian” government contracts have gone to foreign subsidiaries.
Domestic defenders
Meanwhile, The Globe and Mail featured some of the investors and acquisition-focused entrepreneurs looking to build up Canada’s defence supply chain domestically—by buying into often rural and relatively unknown small businesses that play key roles, like developing new treads for tanks.
Letterboxd gets shopped around
BetaKit reported this spring that Letterboxd’s Canadian owner, Tiny, is looking to sell the popular film-review app. The company is now reportedly meeting with a wide-ranging mix of suitors, from Netflix to a VC fund backed by soccer star Lionel Messi. A crowdfunding campaign is looking to prepare a competing offer, arguing that social platforms should be community-owned.
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On the move
This week’s hires, fires, and exec shakeups:
- OMERS Ventures head Saar Pikar is departing to lead Kensington Capital as president. The Globe reports it’s the third leadership change at OMERS Ventures in as many years.
- BenchSci named former Pfizer exec, Mikael Dolsten, as its first board chair.
- AI workforce platform Vendasta promoted two execs to its C-suite: Jean Parchewsky as CPO, and Reilley Dutchak as CFO.
- Xbox layoffs at Montréal video game studios were part of broader local cutbacks this year, including at Epic, Ubisoft, and Behaviour Interactive.
- Siemens is hiring up to 100 new “high-tech” roles for semiconductor design in Saskatoon.
- Vistara Growth promoted healthtech VP Chris Angelatos to director, the company tells BetaKit.
- Goodfood VP of finance Vanessa Hadida is leaving the company.
- Shopify senior product lead for Shop Pay, Jess Alves de Sa, also departed for a new role.
- The Icebreaker co-founder Matthew Lombardi left Telus Global Ventures to join defence VC ONE9.
- Xanadu announced a new quantum workforce training program with Lockheed Martin.
Want to feature a hiring announcement on our list? Email partnerships@betakit.com with the subject line JOBS.
Your score:
Quiz answer: b) Kids. Spotify launched its “managed accounts” feature in Canada, which allows parents to create accounts for young listeners, and keep their algos free of Baby Shark.
Quiz answer: b) Kids. Spotify launched its “managed accounts” feature in Canada, which allows parents to create accounts for young listeners, and keep their algos free of Baby Shark.
#1. This week, Spotify Canada announced new accounts targeted at:
Contributors to the BetaKit newsletter include: Madison McLauchlan (Montréal reporter), Douglas Soltys (editor in chief), Sarah Rieger (managing editor), Trevor Nichols (web editor).
Feature image courtesy Anthropic via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0.