‘Some of the foundations of modern AI came out of Toronto, Montreal, and Edmonton—and so, strikingly, did many of the researchers most committed to making it safe’
Artificial intelligence (AI) developer Anthropic has announced it is committing $10 million CAD to eight Canadian research institutions that are leading the charge for the development of AI use in the country.
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah linked the funding to his own background in Canadian research culture. "Some of the foundations of modern AI came out of Toronto, Montreal, and Edmonton — and so, strikingly, did many of the researchers most committed to making it safe," Olah said.
The funding will go to the following:
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Amii, based in Edmonton, will provide Claude credits to its research and engineering teams to further their work in areas like reinforcement learning and AI trust and safety, as well as to increase AI adoption across Canada's key economic sectors.
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Mila, the Quebec AI institute home to the world's largest concentration of academic deep learning researchers, will make Claude available to its community to support their research in areas including responsible AI, health, sustainability, multi-agent systems, and robotics. Mila will also use Claude to develop AI assistants that help researchers discover and assess scientific breakthroughs.
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The Vector Institute in Toronto will use Claude credits to advance AI research in trust and safety, health and science, and the broader challenges that AI is uniquely positioned to help solve for Canadians.
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CHEO and the CHEO Research Institute will use Claude credits to develop and evaluate AI-enabled approaches aimed at improving health outcomes and the care experience for children, youth, and families, and to study how AI can be most responsibly applied in children's health.
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CAMH will make use of Claude credits across its research, education initiatives, and clinical projects. For example, CAMH's Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics will use Claude to conduct computational mental health research, including developing and evaluating predictive models of treatment for people with mental health conditions, and running large-scale evaluations of fairness in psychiatric AI systems. Credits will also be used to help scale the impact of the CAMH Global Learning Academy, which is developing multilingual, AI-enabled mental health education.
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Université Laval's Institute for Intelligence and Data will work with Claude to deepen researchers' understanding of how LLMs behave in varied cultural contexts, as well as their understanding of low-resource languages and dialects, such as Quebec French and Indigenous languages.
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The University of Saskatchewan will use Claude to further its research in areas including biomedical advancements, food and water security, public health, quantum computing, and public service.
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The University of Toronto Data Sciences Institute will support a range of research projects through a scientific review-based process to access Claude API credits.
CAMH's Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics will use Claude credits for computational mental health research, Anthropic said, "including developing and evaluating predictive models of treatment for people with mental health conditions, and running large-scale evaluations of fairness in psychiatric AI systems."
Canadian employers in construction, skilled trades and technology may face volatile, concentrated hiring demand ahead, as a federal document shows proposed data centre projects nationwide could total more than 20 gigawatts. That is nearly 60 times the 337 megawatts now in operation, The Canadian Press (CP) reported.
Recently, Meta announced it is building its first data centre in Canada, a one-gigawatt facility in Sturgeon County, AB, that the company says represents an investment of more than $13 billion.
Usage data and provincial trends
Anthropic also published its first Canadian country brief, based on the March 2026 Anthropic Economic Index. Canada ranks eighth worldwide in Claude.ai use, Anthropic reported.
Per person, "Canadians use Claude at more than four times the rate the population predicts," trailing only the United States among the top 10 countries by usage, according to the company.
British Columbia leads the country in per-person usage, with Ontario close behind, exceeding what population size alone would predict, Anthropic's data show. Translation-related requests are most common in provinces with larger public-sector workforces, including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec, which Anthropic attributed to federal bilingualism requirements.
National AI strategy
Anthropic's investment lands about a few weeks after Ottawa's own national AI strategy was announced, That strategy, AI for All, pledges more than $2.3 billion and targets an additional $200 billion in economic growth.
There is, however, a gap between government ambition and worker sentiment. According to the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026, a 32-country survey of 23,532 adults, 67% of Canadians said AI makes them nervous, one of the highest rates surveyed, while just 37% believe it has more benefits than drawbacks.
HRD quoted Lewis Curley of KPMG Canada, who called Ottawa's adoption targets fundamentally a people challenge. "The hardest part is usually not choosing or introducing AI tools. It's deciding which decisions stay human," Curley said.
"AI can shorten our emergency room wait times and make a small business more competitive, if it is governed by Canadian values with a clear goal of improving the lives of all Canadians," Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney previously said.
