TL;DR
Anthropic committed C$10 million to eight Canadian institutions for AI research. Canada ranks second in the world in Claude use per capita. Startups get $5,000 API credits.
Anthropic is committing C$10 million to eight Canadian research institutions to fund work on beneficial and responsible AI applications. The partnerships span Canada’s three major regional AI institutes, Amii in Edmonton, Mila in Montreal and the Vector Institute in Toronto, along with CHEO children’s hospital, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, Laval University, the University of Toronto and the University of Saskatchewan.
The funding covers research areas ranging from reinforcement learning and AI safety to mental health, indigenous languages and quantum computing. Mila will use Claude to develop artificial intelligence assistants that help researchers discover and evaluate scientific advances. CAMH’s Krembil Center for Neuroinformatics will create predictive models for mental health treatment and conduct equity evaluations of psychiatric artificial intelligence systems. Université Laval will study how large linguistic models behave in various cultural contexts, including Quebec French and indigenous languages.
Anthropic also released its first Canadian country report from the Anthropic Economic Index. Canada ranks eighth in the world in Claude use, but second in adoption per capita, and Canadians use Claude at more than four times the rate their population predicts. Only the United States ranks higher. Usage follows the local economy: translation requests are higher in provinces with more government workers, reflecting Canada’s bilingualism requirements. British Columbia leads per person use, closely followed by Ontario. Anthropic committed $200 million to partnership with Gates Foundation in May, and the Canadian investment expands the company’s pattern of establishing non-commercial relationships alongside its enterprise business.
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This summer, Anthropic will add Amii, Mila and Vector to its startup program, granting hundreds of affiliated Canadian startups at least $5,000 each in API credits. “Some of the foundations of modern AI emerged from Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton, and surprisingly, so did many of the researchers most committed to making it safe.”said co-founder Chris Olah. Anthropic has been systematically expanding Claude’s presence in companies, governments and now academic institutions, generating distribution and dependence in all sectors simultaneously.
