Canada and Germany commit up to $300 million to Yoshua Bengio's LawZero

Two states are funding a nonprofit to build "Scientist AI," a system designed to monitor other AIs rather than pursue its own goals.

LawZero, the non-profit organization founded by Yoshua Bengio in June 2025, has secured a joint commitment of up to C$300 million from Canada and Germany. The announcement was made on September 16, 2026, with the Turing Award winner speaking at the ALL IN conference in Montreal: "If one day [AI] becomes smarter than us, it's critical that we have the technology in place for AI to serve us, not the other way around."

The money is to finance the development of "Scientist AI", a system designed against frontier models. Where the latter are trained to act autonomously and pursue objectives, this one is designed to reason transparently and produce substantiated outputs, without a goal of their own — the vocation being to serve as a safeguard and surveillance device for other systems.

The funding also opens up a European presence, with an office in Berlin, and the creation of a sovereign computing infrastructure in Canada through partnerships with hosting providers Hypertec and 5C. The scientific team, backed by Mila, which Bengio also founded, will be expanded. Sam Ramadori, former head of BrainBox AI, serves as co-president and executive director. LawZero started with nearly US$30 million in philanthropic funding.