The AI North Brief

Send us Fan Mail  Canada's new national AI strategy, "AI for All," contains a contradiction hiding in plain sight. When Canadian businesses hold back from adopting AI, the strategy is gracious: it reports that 78 per cent of non-adopting firms simply do not see the value yet, calls this "not resistance" but "a translation problem," and answers with a $500-million...

Send us Fan Mail Description: If the predictive cage isn't a design flaw but a business model, what kind of economic system would produce AI that serves human flourishing instead of extraction? Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Elinor Ostrom, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, and surveillance capitalism theorist Shoshana Zuboff each offer a piece of the answer. The episode explores why mar...

Send us Fan Mail Description: What happens to your identity when an AI system decides what you want before you do? A new piece on AGI Ethics News argues that agentic AI will create "predictive cages," feedback loops that lock people into their historical data and eliminate the capacity for surprise and self-reinvention. Oxford's Carina Prunkl challenges the concept of an "optim...

Send us Fan Mail Description The family of a 12-year-old shot three times at Tumbler Ridge Secondary is suing OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges approximately 12 employees flagged the shooter's ChatGPT interactions as an imminent risk and recommended calling police. Leadership rebuffed them. The same day the lawsuit landed, security researcher Bruce Schneier argued in the Globe and Mail that Canada...

Send us Fan Mail Description A Rogers contractor spent months training the AI tool his company introduced. Then he was laid off with a thousand others. In Montreal, a think tank used AI to write a policy paper. It passed peer review, beating human submissions. And in Ottawa, AI Minister Evan Solomon secured new commitments from OpenAI on Canadian oversight following the Tumbler Ridge shooting. Thr...

Send us Fan Mail Description One week after the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic, they're back negotiating. The sticking point: seven words about bulk data surveillance. Meanwhile, Claude continues selecting strike targets in Iran. And a question no one has answered: did Claude generate the coordinates for the school strike that killed 165 girls? The war enters day six. Carney says Canada can&a...

Send us Fan Mail Description Four days into the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and the two leading AI companies are on opposite sides of a question that suddenly feels concrete. Anthropic held its red lines on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. It got blacklisted. OpenAI rushed in with a deal Sam Altman now calls "opportunistic and sloppy." Claude hit number one in the App Store. 900 wor...

Send us Fan Mail OpenAI's safety team met with federal officials in Ottawa yesterday to explain why it didn't alert Canadian police about a ChatGPT user who described gun violence scenarios eight months before the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting. The company banned the account but determined the activity didn't meet its threshold for reporting to law enforcement. Now Canada is asking wh...

Send us Fan Mail Description Prime Minister Mark Carney visits India this week, the first Canadian leader to do so since relations collapsed in 2023. The ten-day Indo-Pacific tour includes stops in Australia and Japan, with artificial intelligence, clean energy, and critical minerals at the center of discussions. At stake: a $70 billion trade deal with India, the operationalization of the ACITI tr...

Send us Fan Mail Canadian firms are slower to adopt AI than their global peers. Only about one-quarter have fully implemented AI, compared to one-third globally. But IBM data shows 84% of Canadian executives are confident in 2026 performance and 86% are already using agentic AI. So which is it? This episode examines the disconnect between Canada's research strength and its commercialization s...

Send us Fan Mail The deadline for Canada's sovereign AI data centre proposals closed on Saturday. For the past month, the federal government accepted pitches for projects over 100 megawatts, Canadian-controlled, designed to reduce dependence on foreign compute. Brookfield estimates hyperscale data centres cost $10 million per megawatt to build, with compute infrastructure adding another $30 m...

Send us Fan Mail Description Canada and Germany signed an AI cooperation agreement at the Munich Security Conference, launching the Sovereign Technology Alliance. The deal focuses on compute infrastructure, AI research, and talent development. It explicitly names Yoshua Bengio's LawZero as a potential area for collaboration. The signing comes as the Munich conference wrapped with warnings abo...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Description A new paper just dropped in AI & Society with a provocative title: "Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the New Authoritarianism." Philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh argues that AI isn't politically neutral. The way it's being deployed mirrors features of historical fascism, just through quieter mechanisms: data extraction, algorithmic governanc...

Send us Fan Mail  Canadian security officials testified this week that AI deepfakes will "very likely" target the next federal election. Their solution? "Hopefully AI will help us detect AI. Hopefully." That's a lot of hope doing a lot of heavy lifting. This episode looks at the global evidence—Slovakia, India, Taiwan, Germany—and a concept called the "liar's div...

Send us Fan Mail Canada is sending an AI delegation to the World Governments Summit in Dubai this week—over 200 companies applied to pitch Canadian AI solutions to 35 heads of state and 6,000 participants. The mission follows an October MOU between Minister Evan Solomon and the UAE, with delegates presenting "responsible, human-centred AI" for government decision-making, health services,...

Send us Fan Mail Will a company ever voluntarily kill a machine that’s making them money? Ontario recently released joint principles for responsible AI use, including a bold requirement: organizations must be ready to "decommission" any AI system producing unsafe or discriminatory outputs. It sounds good on paper, but in the high-stakes world of corporate efficiency, it ignores a fundame...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Description Microsoft beat on every metric and the stock dropped six percent. What the earnings call revealed about AI infrastructure spending, OpenAI concentration risk, and why Canada's sovereign compute push faces a $72 billion scale gap. Chapter Markers / Timecodes 00:00 – Intro 00:25 – The Earnings 01:45 – The Spending Problem 03:30 – The OpenAI Problem 05:00 – W...

Send us Fan Mail Y Combinator has quietly removed Canada from its list of countries where it invests. Canadian startups now need to incorporate in the U.S., Cayman Islands, or Singapore to join the world's most prestigious accelerator. YC president Garry Tan confirmed the change, saying Canadian founders should "just convert to Delaware C Corp" if they want to raise money. But on th...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Description Shopify cuts jobs in its partnerships division as it restructures around "agentic commerce"—AI agents that shop on your behalf. The company launched Agentic Storefronts and co-developed Google's Universal Commerce Protocol with Walmart, Target, and others. Meanwhile, New York-based Forum Ventures is doubling down on Toronto, raising $21.5 million...

Send us Fan Mail At CES 2026, NVIDIA declared "the ChatGPT moment for robotics is here." China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, 54% of the global total. Its operational stock now exceeds 2 million units, more than the rest of the world combined. Canada? We rank 13th globally. Behind Spain. Behind India. Behind France. This matters because Canada has a productivity crisis. B...

Send us Fan Mail The US just closed a $14 billion forced divestiture of TikTok, requiring American ownership, algorithm retraining, and domestic data storage. Meanwhile, Canada scrapped its TikTok shutdown order and agreed to start the national security review from scratch. Same app, same Chinese parent company, completely opposite outcomes. We break down what Michael Geist calls a government that...

Send us Fan Mail Prime Minister Mark Carney just returned from Beijing with a landmark trade deal—49,000 Chinese EVs at 6.1% tariffs in exchange for China dropping duties on Canadian canola. One year after calling China the "biggest threat" to Canada, Carney now speaks of a "new strategic partnership" and a "new world order." But this isn't just about cars and ca...

Send us Fan Mail Tax season 2026 brings new AI tools—and new AI scams. The CRA's Charlie chatbot got a $18M generative AI upgrade, but how do you know which AI tools to trust? In 2024, Canadians lost over $638 million to fraud, with AI making scams harder to spot. Voice cloning now takes just 3 seconds of audio. Deepfakes fooled an Ontario man out of $12,000 using fake Trudeau videos. One Hon...

Send us Fan Mail Canada's AI ministry used AI to analyze 11,300+ public consultation responses—despite internal warnings it could "further undermine public trust." This episode unpacks what happened when the federal government turned to Cohere, OpenAI, and Anthropic to parse feedback on Canada's AI strategy, and why critics say the entire process was designed to prioritize indu...

Send us Fan Mail AI North Brief | Episode 4: The Landlord Trap The Lead Canada is committing billions to the Sovereign AI Compute Strategy , but a fundamental rift has emerged in the national AI Task Force. While Ottawa builds data centers, critics argue we are becoming "landlords" in an economy where foreign giants own the actual house. The Core Tension We analyze the warning from Danie...