Question Period Note: Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute

A Question Period note (reference AIDI-2026-QP-00001) prepared for Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, and released through proactive disclosure. It answers why the Government of Canada created the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (CAISI).

The note states that CAISI was created in November 2024 to advance scientific understanding of the risks of the most advanced AI systems and to provide tools to address them, leveraging Canada's research ecosystem through the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the National Research Council (NRC). It records that CAISI is a founding member of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes, that its 2025–26 research priorities cover risk assessment, understanding how AI systems behave, and techniques to make them safer, and that it has signed a $1-million research partnership with the UK AI Security Institute (July 2025) and a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian AI company Cohere.