Canada AI Minister Acknowledges Risks, Says AI Will Be Regulated to Protect Citizens

Evan Solomon, Canada's federal minister for AI, acknowledged during an interview on September 14 that artificial intelligence poses risks, saying AI will be regulated to protect Canadians. "Does AI pose risks? Of course it does. Yes, we are aware of these risks," he said, adding that regulation is the government's top priority and concern.

Solomon said he spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the morning of September 13 and announced that he would release an AI safety announcement on September 16 together with Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist often called a "godfather of AI."

The remarks come amid growing debate over AI safety in the industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently called on AI companies to slow down development, a proposal supported by Altman and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. David Krueger, a researcher at the University of Montreal, has argued that merely slowing down is insufficient and has called for an immediate indefinite pause on frontier AI development.