OTTAWA — Warnings about the risks posed by artificial intelligence have sparked a heated global debate this past week, and Canada has taken a mix of public reassurances, funding commitments and diplomatic outreach as the discussion unfolds.
Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon, speaking at the All‑In 2026 conference in Montreal on Sept. 16, said Canada “takes all the risks seriously” but did not directly answer whether he believes AI poses an existential threat. He noted that such warnings are not new and pointed to steps Canada has already taken, including the AI Safety Institute, which received $50 million under the federal national AI strategy.
Solomon also announced an investment of up to $300 million by Canada and Germany to support the development of safe AI by Yoshua Bengio and his LawZero non‑profit. According to a LawZero press release, the group’s flagship approach, called Scientist AI, “treats reliability as a core capability, centring on developing a fundamentally new form of AI designed to be trustworthy and safe from inception.”
AI safety and international calls for coordination
The recent flurry of warnings began when researcher Jacob Coxon, a former employee of both OpenAI and Anthropic, posted on X that neither company was acting responsibly. He accused both firms of “racing straight to self‑improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” and said those building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged a slowdown in the pace of AI development over the weekend, calling for industry coordination. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he agreed with Amodei that “we need to pace the frontier,” and xAI CEO Elon Musk posted, “Dario is right.”
Former Bank of Canada governor and U.K. Prime Minister Mark Carney has called for a global “technology stability” body, likening it to the Financial Stability Board and urging international coordination. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Europe is “in the position to shape global efforts on how to tackle” AI and that she would “step up together with our like‑minded partners like Canada, the United Kingdom and others.” She said Europe intends to “team up on model evaluation, verification, early warning, AI security and much more,” and would invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Solomon said discussions about a technology stability body are under way and have involved Carney talking with other leaders. “These are not conversations that are coming out of thin air, nor are there conversations that one country is trying to take credit for,” he said.
Industry perspectives and Canadian voices
Not all industry figures support Amodei’s proposals. Aidan Gomez, CEO of Toronto‑based Cohere, criticized Amodei’s request for the U.S. government to loosen antitrust rules to facilitate industry cooperation, calling it “a red flag.” Speaking on the same Montreal panel as Solomon, Gomez said, “It shouldn’t be a few companies in Silicon Valley setting the bar and trying to pull up the ladder behind them and implement regulatory capture,” and called for “a multi‑stakeholder approach that is much more grounded in the reality of the technology as it exists today and what we can foresee in the near future.”
Gomez also criticized public attempts to quantify extinction risk, saying: “They throw out numbers, like 10 per cent chance that there’s going to be extinction of our species due to this technology. That’s not a mathematical result, and it’s extremely misleading to the public to throw out these numbers that are just, like, your gut vibe check on what might be coming, as though it’s a concrete quantitative measurement.”
Geopolitics, skepticism and alliances
Not everyone accepts the premise that AI development must be slowed. U.S. President Donald Trump posted online, “I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!”
French finance minister Roland Lescure suggested calls to slow AI development could serve the interests of top U.S. AI companies, saying they “are now coming from those at the top of the class … Making everyone behind them slow down so they can stay in first place,” Reuters reported.
Germany’s digital transformation minister Karsten Wildberger, who appeared on the Montreal panel with Solomon and Gomez, said the alliance between Germany and Canada — which signed an AI agreement in Montreal a year ago — was “very much” about avoiding dependence on the U.S. and China.
The debate continues to unfold, with governments, companies and researchers voicing differing views on how best to balance the risks and benefits of rapidly advancing AI technologies.
