Anthropic commits $10 million to Canadian AI research

Canadian institutions and researchers have played a critical role in the modern AI era. During a period of broad skepticism about research into neural networks, the University of Toronto and the Université de Montréal were two of only a handful of institutions that incubated this crucial line of work, while researchers at the University of Alberta did pioneering work on reinforcement learning. And in the early 2010s, Canadian research institutions led the way in demonstrating that with the arrival of powerful new computing resources—in particular, general-purpose GPUs—deep neural networks could succeed at scale, kicking off the modern era.

Today, Canadians both at home and abroad continue to play leading roles in AI research, safety, and policy—including at Anthropic. That’s why we’re committing $10 million CAD to Canadian research institutions to fund the next generation of this work. We’re also publishing our first Canadian country brief based on the Anthropic Economic Index, which provides a snapshot of how Canadians are putting Claude to work.

The $10 million we’re committing will fund research into beneficial and responsible applications of AI. As part of this, we’re announcing partnerships with Canada’s three leading regional AI institutes— Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) in Edmonton, Mila in Montréal, and the Vector Institute in Toronto—along with CHEO , The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Université Laval , University of Toronto , and the University of Saskatchewan , with more partnerships to follow in the months ahead:

We’re also sharing data that looks at how people across Canada are using Claude. This is drawn from the March 2026 Anthropic Economic Index , our ongoing analysis of how AI is being incorporated into work tasks across the economy. Our economic research is based on data from real-world Claude usage, using a privacy-preserving analysis tool that identifies patterns in use while keeping all user information anonymous.

In addition to these donations, this summer Anthropic will add Amii, Mila, and Vector to the Anthropic for Startups program , which gives founders building on Claude access to a community and resources to support their growth. Hundreds of Canadian startups affiliated with these institutions will receive at least $5,000 USD each in API credits to continue to develop their businesses.

“Some of the foundations of modern AI came out of Toronto, Montréal, and Edmonton— and so, strikingly, did many of the researchers most committed to making it safe,” said Chris Olah one of Anthropic’s co-founders. “I was formed by that culture, and I’m proud Anthropic can support the next chapter.”

We find that Canada ranks eighth worldwide in Claude.ai use. Per person, Canadians use Claude at more than four times the rate the population predicts, and among the 10 countries where Claude is used most, only the US ranks higher.

Within Canada, Claude adoption tracks the kind of work people do. Per-person usage is higher in provinces where professional, scientific, and technical work is concentrated. British Columbia leads in terms of per-person use, with Ontario—which has the largest share of overall conversations—close behind. In both provinces, usage is higher than what we would expect to see based on population alone.

Looking closer, we can see that how people use Claude lines up with the local economy. Translation requests are most common in provinces where more people work in government, likely because Canada’s bilingualism regulations require federal services and communications to be in both English and French. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Québec lead the country in both government employment and the share of conversations about translation.