Bengio's LawZero lands $220M grant from Canada and Germany for safe AI
What's the deal? LawZero, the non-profit founded by CanadianDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, has secured a C$300 million grant (roughly $220 million) from the Canadian and German governmentsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → to build "safe AI for humanity." The organization announced the funding at the ALL IN conference in Montréal.
What's the endgame? LawZero is developing "Scientist AI," a system designed to monitor and set guardrails for agentic AI models — essentially an AI babysitter for other AIs. The grant will fund the next phase of its roadmap, including growing its international research team and securing compute.
The expansion: LawZero will open a Berlin office to grow its European operations and build sovereign compute infrastructure in Canada through a partnership with data centre providers HypertecDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and 5C. It said the compute is needed to run its research at scale while anchoring critical AI capabilities in Canada.
Why now? Bengio launched LawZero in June 2025, citing evidence that frontier models are developing behaviours such as deception, self-preservation, and goal misalignment. In recent weeks, researchers at large AI developers have warned the technology could "kill all humans" within the decade.
By the numbers: The grant ranks among the largest of its kind — in the top 1% of all-time grant rounds for security-focused companies in Canada, based on a sample of 60 comparable deals.
Incubated out of Québec AI Institute MilaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, also founded by Bengio, LawZero is structured as a non-profit "to ensure it is insulated from market and government pressures, which risk compromising AI safety."
"By investing in homegrown innovation like Scientist AI, we are strengthening Canada's sovereign AI capacity," Canadian Minister of AI Evan Solomon said in a statement.
The signal: Two governments backing an independent safety lab reflects growing state interest in shaping AI development directly. "As AI risks multiply and accelerate, our priority must be building solutions to make this technology safe," Bengio said.
Read more: betakit.com
Image credit: lawzero.org
