Aidan Gomez, chief executive of Toronto-based Cohere, said the public should reject "fearmongering" about artificial intelligence. Scare talk, he warned, could damage what he called a rare opening for Canada. He pointed to the recent uproar after an Anthropic researcher assigned more than a 10 percent chance that AI will wipe out humanity within a decade.

New safeguards are warranted, Gomez said. Those rules must still be set against commercial chances, including work that could bring down costs. Safety and growth, in his telling, are not a one-way trade. Canada should not talk itself out of building and selling the technology.

The 10 percent figure is doing too much political work

Catastrophic forecasts have moved from research Slack channels into hearings. A probability north of 10 percent, attached to "end humanity" and "within a decade," is built to travel. It is also a terrible statute. Legislatures that treat one researcher's number as a blueprint will write limits that freeze the firms that do not have a San Francisco press shop.

Gomez runs one of Canada's leading AI companies. His remarks were aimed as much at politicians and the public as at other technologists: treat that forecast as one input, not as a reason to shut the door. I agree with the direction, not with the idea that safeguards are optional. Limits that leave room to compete are the whole argument. Limits that exist only as a vibe are how you get neither safety nor an industry.

If Ottawa copies the loudest doomsday slide, the opening Gomez is talking about closes. Talent, compute contracts, and enterprise deals will go to jurisdictions that kept shipping. If Ottawa writes usable rules and still lets firms sell, Canada actually has a shot at being more than a talent exporter.

Toronto's cluster is not a white paper

Gomez is a co-author of the 2017 Attention Is All You Need paper, then left Google Brain to found Cohere in Toronto in 2019. The company sells enterprise language models rather than a consumer chatbot brand. That is the commercial opening he is trying to protect: Canadian firms that can lower the cost of using the tech, not Canadian op-eds about whether the tech should exist.

Montreal's Mila, Toronto's Vector Institute, and a decade of public-money bets on Hinton, Bengio, and the surrounding labs are why this speech has a domestic audience. Bill C-27 and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act spent years in Ottawa as the homegrown attempt to write rules before the models finished writing themselves. The political weather around those files is exactly the weather Gomez is talking into.

Compare that with Palantir's Alex Karp putting nationalization of leading labs on the table in the same news cycle, a harder line than reasonable guidelines. Gomez is arguing from a smaller country's commercial interest. Karp is arguing from a contractor's fear of frontier labs. Different incentives. Same week of argument.

Canada is also trying to look investable in analog assets. Opening the four biggest airports to private capital is that instinct in concrete and runways. AI policy that scares off builders would undercut the same pitch. Carney telling Washington that Canada will choose its own partners is the foreign-policy version. Gomez is making the industrial-policy version.

Write rules that still let someone ship

CBC News Money carried Gomez's warning as a policy argument, not a product demo. The useful part is the balance he named: new AI safeguards against opportunities like lowering costs. The less useful part would be pretending the Anthropic probability is a nothingburger. It is a real claim from a real lab. It should not be the only claim in the room.

Practical test for the next few months: does a Canadian AI bill, consultation, or procurement rule cite extinction odds as an operative threshold, or does it cite evaluation, liability, and deployable safeguards? The first path is fear as statute. The second is the opening Gomez wants kept.

Factory-floor fights, including Unifor telling Stellantis not to dump Brampton, are a reminder that Canada already knows what it looks like when capital leaves a file. AI is earlier. Talking the country out of it would be a choice, not a fate. Gomez used the word fearmongering on purpose. The 10 percent number will keep getting quoted. Quote the cost-cutting work too, or the opening he described will exist only in speeches. A procurement rule that asks for an evaluation report is a safeguard. A procurement rule that asks for a probability of extinction is a press release.