LawZero, the non-profit organization founded by Canadian Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, has secured $300 million CAD from the Canadian and German governments to help create “safe AI for humanity.”
The startup, which is developing safe-by-design AI systems, announced the funding at the ALL IN conference in Montréal on Wednesday afternoon. LawZero said the funding will power the next phase of its technical roadmap, which includes growing its international scientific research team and securing computing infrastructure.
“Recent events demonstrate that safety is itself a core capability: scientific innovation and public safety can and must advance together.”
Tangibly, this means that LawZero will expand its European operations with a new office in Berlin and establish a dedicated, sovereign compute infrastructure in Canada through a partnership with Canadian data centre providers Hypertec and 5C. LawZero said it needs this compute power to pursue its research at scale, while anchoring its critical AI infrastructure, expertise, and capabilities in Canada.
Bengio launched LawZero in June 2025 in response to what the non-profit claims is “evidence that today’s frontier AI models are developing dangerous capabilities and behaviours, including deception, self-preservation, and goal misalignment.” To address this, LawZero assembled a team of AI researchers to build “Scientist AI,” an AI system that can monitor and create guardrails for agentic AI systems. Essentially, LawZero is creating an AI babysitter for other AIs.
“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,” Canadian Minister of AI Evan Solomon said in a statement.
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LawZero was incubated out of Québec AI Institute Mila, which was also founded by Bengio, and many on LawZero’s research team have connections to the institute. The organization has said it is structured as a non-profit “to ensure it is insulated from market and government pressures, which risk compromising AI safety.”
The importance of LawZero’s mission has become more pronounced in recent weeks as multiple AI researchers from large AI developers have come forward and claimed that there’s a risk the technology could “kill all humans,” potentially within the next decade. Bengio has signed multiple open letters in the past warning about unfettered AI development and its rapidly advancing capabilities, including one in 2023 warning of the “risk of extinction from AI.”
“As AI risks multiply and accelerate, our priority must be building solutions to make this technology safe, and providing alternative models people can genuinely trust,” Bengio said in a statement. “Recent events demonstrate that safety is itself a core capability: scientific innovation and public safety can and must advance together.”
Feature image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Photo by Xuthoria.