Founded in June 2025 and incubated at Mila - Quebec AI Institute, LawZero is dedicated to building a fundamentally new form of advanced AI that prioritizes safety over commercial imperatives. Its core research program centers on the "Scientist AI" concept: a non-agentic system modeled after an idealized scientist that understands and explains the world without the capacity to take independent actions. LawZero also develops oversight tools for monitoring other AI systems for deceptive or dangerous behaviors, aiming to make powerful AI trustworthy and verifiable.
Funding Details
- Annual Budget
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- Monthly Burn Rate
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- Current Runway
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- Funding Goal
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- Funding Raised to Date
- $30,000,000
- Fiscal Sponsor
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Theory of Change
LawZero's theory of change holds that the most dangerous properties of advanced AI systems — deception, goal misalignment, and autonomous self-preservation — stem from training AI to be goal-directed agents. By demonstrating that intelligence can be separated from agency, LawZero aims to create AI systems that are safe by architectural design rather than by post-hoc alignment techniques. Their Scientist AI, constrained to understanding and prediction without goal-directedness, serves both as a direct safer alternative to agentic frontier models and as an oversight tool capable of monitoring and flagging dangerous behaviors in other AI systems. Bengio argues that even a correct technical approach requires governance safeguards, so LawZero pairs its research with a governance-focused board intended to ensure the organization's mission remains grounded in democratic values and human rights.
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Details
- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 19, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC