AI company Anthropic has announced a CAD 10 million commitment to support artificial intelligence research across leading Canadian institutions, reinforcing the country's long-standing role in advancing AI innovation and responsible AI development.

The investment will fund research into beneficial and trustworthy AI applications through partnerships with Canada's three regional AI institutes, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), Mila, and the Vector Institute, alongside healthcare and academic organisations including CHEO, The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Université Laval, the University of Toronto, and the University of Saskatchewan. Anthropic said additional partnerships will be announced in the coming months.

The funding will primarily provide access to Claude through API credits, enabling researchers to accelerate work in areas such as AI trust and safety, reinforcement learning, healthcare, sustainability, robotics, multilingual AI, and scientific discovery.

At Amii, researchers will use Claude to advance projects in reinforcement learning and AI safety while supporting AI adoption across key Canadian industries. Mila will deploy Claude to support research spanning responsible AI, health, sustainability, robotics, and multi-agent systems, while also developing AI assistants to help researchers identify and evaluate scientific breakthroughs.

The Vector Institute will leverage Claude to expand research in AI trust and safety, health, and science, focusing on challenges with significant societal impact.

Healthcare organisations are also expected to benefit from the initiative. CHEO and the CHEO Research Institute will explore AI-enabled approaches to improve healthcare outcomes for children and families, while studying responsible AI deployment in paediatric care.

At CAMH, Claude will support computational mental health research, including predictive treatment models, fairness evaluations in psychiatric AI systems, and multilingual AI-powered mental health education through the CAMH Global Learning Academy.

Meanwhile, Université Laval's Institute for Intelligence and Data will investigate how large language models perform across different cultural contexts, including low-resource languages such as Quebec French and Indigenous languages.

The University of Saskatchewan plans to utilise Claude to support research in biomedical sciences, food and water security, public health, quantum computing, and public service innovation, while the University of Toronto Data Sciences Institute will distribute Claude API credits to research projects through a scientific review process.

In addition to the research funding, Anthropic announced that Amii, Mila, and the Vector Institute will join the Anthropic for Startups programme later this summer. Through the initiative, hundreds of Canadian startups affiliated with these institutions will receive at least $5,000 each in Claude API credits to accelerate AI product development.

Alongside the investment, Anthropic also released its first Canadian country brief based on the Anthropic Economic Index, offering insights into how Canadian organisations are adopting Claude across industries.

Commenting on the initiative, Chris Olah, Anthropic co-founder, said Canada has played a foundational role in the evolution of modern AI.

"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. I was formed by that culture, and I'm proud Anthropic can support the next chapter," he said.