AI giant offering Claude credits to top universities and AI institutes.<\/p>\n
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AI giant Anthropic is investing in Canadian research through partnerships with leading universities and the nation\u2019s federally backed AI institutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAccess to Anthropic\u2019s models is a powerful accelerant for the work being carried out across Mila\u2019s research community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hugo Larochelle, Mila<\/p>\n
Anthropic announced on Tuesday that it is committing $10 million CAD to fund research into \u201cbeneficial and responsible applications of AI.\u201d Though the exact funding breakdown was not immediately clear, the company said it\u2019s partnering with Edmonton\u2019s Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), Montr\u00e9al\u2019s Mila, and Toronto\u2019s Vector Institute, as well as CHEO, The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Universit\u00e9 Laval, University of Toronto (UofT), and the University of Saskatchewan\u2014with more to be announced.<\/p>\n
Across the universities, the company is providing credits for its widely used AI model, Claude, to support research and engineering. Amii, Mila, and Vector are also joining the Anthropic for Startups program, which could offer Canadian startups more Claude credits and resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAccess to Anthropic\u2019s models is a powerful accelerant for the work being carried out across Mila\u2019s research community,\u201d Mila scientific director Hugo Larochelle said in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a blog post<\/a> announcing the funding, Anthropic noted that the University of Toronto and Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al led research into neural networks\u2014which underpin today\u2019s generative AI systems\u2014and researchers at the University of Alberta made headway in reinforcement learning.\u00a0<\/p>\n RELATED: Why the threat of Anthropic\u2019s Mythos demonstrates the need for sovereign AI<\/a><\/p>\n Chris Olah, a Canadian researcher and Anthropic\u2019s co-founder, said in a statement that the foundations of modern AI came from Toronto, Montr\u00e9al, and Edmonton. \u201cI was formed by that culture, and I\u2019m proud Anthropic can support the next chapter,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The news comes as the Canadian government has said AI sovereignty is a pillar of its national AI strategy, which seeks to support domestic AI companies and help them scale up. The feds were granted access to Anthropic\u2019s Claude Mythos Preview<\/a> model in early June, before the US instated a foreign-access ban, then lifted restrictions<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n