USask to receive funding to advance Canadian AI research

USask will receive $1 million to support AI-driven research and innovation that strengthens communities, industry and the economy through our areas of focus, including agriculture, health, and quantum computing.

We thank Anthropic for the support and confidence in us as we continue to lead the next generation of innovation.

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The following release was originally published by Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/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:

• Amii, based in Edmonton, will provide Claude credits to its research and engineering teams to further their work in areas like reinforcement learning and AI trust and safety, as well as to increase AI adoption across Canada’s key econoxmic sectors.
• Mila, the Quebec AI institute home to the world’s largest concentration of academic deep learning researchers, will make Claude available to its community to support their research in areas including responsible AI, health, sustainability, multi-agent systems, and robotics. Mila will also use Claude to develop AI assistants that help researchers discover and assess scientific breakthroughs.
• The Vector Institute in Toronto will use Claude credits to advance AI research in trust and safety, health and science, and the broader challenges that AI is uniquely positioned to help solve for Canadians.
• CHEO and the CHEO Research Institute will use Claude credits to develop and evaluate AI-enabled approaches aimed at improving health outcomes and the care experience for children, youth, and families, and to study how AI can be most responsibly applied in children's health.
• CAMH will make use of Claude credits across its research, education initiatives, and clinical projects. For example, CAMH’s Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics will use Claude to conduct computational mental health research, including developing and evaluating predictive models of treatment for people with mental health conditions, and running large-scale evaluations of fairness in psychiatric AI systems. Credits will also be used to help scale the impact of the CAMH Global Learning Academy, which is developing multilingual, AI-enabled mental health education.
• Université Laval’s Institute for Intelligence and Data will work with Claude to deepen researchers’ understanding of how LLMs behave in varied cultural contexts, as well as their understanding of low-resource languages and dialects, such as Quebec French and Indigenous languages.
• The University of Saskatchewan will use Claude to further its research in areas including biomedical advancements, food and water security, public health, quantum computing, and public service.
• The University of Toronto Data Sciences Institute will support a range of research projects through a scientific review-based process to access Claude API credits.

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’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.

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.

The countries that invest the most in advanced AI over the next few years will also shape the rules that govern it. We’ve long believed democracies should lead that work, and Canada has a place at the forefront. Canada published the world’s first national AI strategy in 2017, and this June published its next: AI for All, which commits to strengthening the country’s AI safety institute, expanding AI literacy, and reinforcing the three national institutes that have anchored Canadian research for nearly a decade.

Last week we published a case study on the Government of Alberta, whose Ministry of Technology and Innovation used Claude Code to review 466 million lines of code across provincial systems in roughly 20 hours, then shared their methods with other governments.

The eight partnerships we’re announcing today are just the beginning of our investment in Canadian research. We look forward to supporting this work—in research, in hospitals, and in universities—for years to come.