Canada Partners With United Kingdom To Invest In Groundbreaking AI Alignment Research

On July  30, 2025, the Government of Canada announced that it is partnering with the United Kingdom to aid in the UK’s AI Security Institute’s Alignment Project (the “Project”), an initiative to advance research on artificial intelligence (“AI”) alignment. The Project will support efforts to ensure the safety of advanced AI systems by maintaining their transparency, predictability, and responsiveness to human oversight.

The Government of Canada has expressed its commitment to scaling up Canada’s AI ecosystem, building AI infrastructure, increasing the adoption of AI technologies and fostering public trust.

Aligned with this commitment, the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and the Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario announced that the Canadian AI Safety Institute, through the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, will contribute $1 million to the Project, aimed at ensuring advanced AI systems operate safely and reliably. This Project is also backed by a $29 million investment from an international coalition that includes Amazon Web Services, among other organizations.

The Project is to be guided by a “world-class” advisory board which includes Canadian AI experts. One of the initiatives of the Project is to remove barriers that have previously limited alignment research by offering three support streams:

1. Funding grants up to $1.8 million for research across disciplines including computer science and cognitive science;
2. Access to compute resources in order to further enable technical experiments; and
3. Investments from private funders to accelerate commercial alignment solutions.

In addition to this initiative, the Government of Canada has previously launched other initiatives to support the safe and responsible development, deployment, and adoption of AI systems across Canada, including the Voluntary Code of Conduct on the Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI systems and its accompanying guide for managers implementing the Code of Conduct (as previously reported by E-TIPS® Newsletter here and here, respectively).

Summary By: Victoria Di Felice