The Godfathers of AI, on the record
The Godfathers of AI are warning the world.
Two Canadians taught the world's machines to think. Yoshua Bengio (Montreal) and Geoffrey Hinton (Toronto) shared the 2018 Turing Award, computing's Nobel. Hinton then took the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics outright. Both are warning, on the record, that the technology they built is racing ahead of the rules.
Sources: nobelprize.org (Hinton, 2024), acm.org (Hinton + Bengio + LeCun, 2018), mila.quebec (Bengio).
We are asking Parliament for three things:
-
Summit
Canada convenes the first serious global AI summit. Same playbook that healed the ozone (Montreal, 1987). Same playbook that banned the landmines (Ottawa, 1997).
Read Demand 1 -
Liability
AI companies pay for the harm they cause. The same standard cars, drugs, and airplanes already meet. No carve-outs.
Read Demand 2 -
Transition
A national body for the workers AI displaces. The UK has one. The EU has one. The US has one. Canada has none.
Read Demand 3
Your stake
What is in it for you?
Every Canadian has something on the line. Pick yours. Thirty seconds, on the record.
The policy vacuum, Stanford AI Index 2026
Cars, drugs, and airplanes come with rules.
AI does not.
Canada has ZERO active AI laws. The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act died on the Order Paper when Parliament was prorogued on 6 January 2025. Nothing has replaced it. Meanwhile the United States passed 25, South Korea 17, France and Japan 10 each.
Sign. This session of Parliament, not next.Source: Stanford AI Index 2026, Ch. 8 Fig. 8.4.3 (Digital Policy Alert tracking, 2016 to 2025). AI incidents rose 55% year over year in 2025 (AIID, in AI Index 2026 Ch. 3).
Who is building it
Five companies are spending $500 million a year to make sure nobody governs AI.
- Meta
- Microsoft
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
They spend roughly $500 million a year on lobbying so the rules stay off. (Public Citizen, AI Lobbying Report, 2025.)
Who is sounding the alarm
The Godfathers' warning, and the experts who agree
Two Canadians taught the world’s machines to think.
Both are warning, on the record, that the systems they built are racing ahead of the rules.
- Geoffrey Hinton Quit Google in May 2023, specifically to say this in public. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, for the work that made modern AI possible.
- Yoshua Bengio Chairs the International AI Safety Report, commissioned by thirty nations. The 2018 Turing Award, computing’s Nobel, shared with Hinton.
They have been sounding the alarm for years.
Our politicians have treated them as background noise, while Canada still has ZERO active AI laws to protect its citizens from the greatest financial and safety risks in our country’s history.
-
Geoffrey Hinton
University of Toronto
- Nobel Prize, Physics, 2024
- Turing Award, 2018
-
Yoshua Bengio
Universite de Montreal, Mila
- Turing Award, 2018
- Scientific Director, Mila
Sources: nobelprize.org (Hinton, 2024), acm.org (Hinton + Bengio + LeCun, 2018), mila.quebec (Bengio).
Ten other top experts on the record
Yuval Noah Harari
Tristan Harris
Elon Musk
Roman Yampolskiy
Simon Willison
Andrew Yang
Karen Hao
Mo Gawdat
Zoe Hitzig
Daron Acemoglu
Endorsed by
On the record, with us.
The last twenty years, by the numbers
The same five companies. The same playbook. Twenty years lost.
Social media was the first experiment. The AI was primitive. The damage was not.
-
+145%
Rise in major depressive episodes among US girls aged 12 to 17 since 2010.
NSDUH, CDC, 2023. See also Haidt, The Anxious Generation, 2024.
-
87M
Facebook users whose data was scraped without consent and used to manipulate elections across multiple countries.
Cambridge Analytica disclosure, 2014 to 2018.
-
20 yrs
From Facebook’s launch (2004) to Canada’s first serious online-harms statute, Bill C-63 (2024).
Parliament of Canada, Bill C-63 (Online Harms Act), 1st reading 2024.
“Even very primitive AIs that merely curated human content were sufficient to destabilize democratic societies.”
The petition
What your signature demands.
No company can slow down alone. No country can regulate alone. That is why we are asking for all three.
We are asking Parliament for three things.
-
No. 01 · Most urgent
Call an Emergency Global AI Governance Summit, Convened by Canada.
AI is moving faster than any nation can govern alone. Canada has done this twice before, and the world followed.
The frontier nations cannot throttle themselves. The US race is structural. China’s is too. The chair at the head of the table is empty because the two countries with the most at stake are also the two least free to convene. Canada has done exactly this twice, on ozone in Montreal in 1987 and on landmines in Ottawa in 1997, both times standing up when the biggest powers could not.
Convene the first serious global AI governance summit before someone else writes the rules for us.
-
No. 02
Enforce Real Liability for AI-Caused Harms.
AI companies must be legally responsible for the harm their systems cause, to children, to workers, to the public.
No Section 230 carve-out. The same standard of care every other consequential industry already meets.
-
No. 03
Establish a National AI Transition Body.
Every peer economy is building a body to coordinate AI’s impact on workers. Canada has none.
A body reporting to Parliament, not just the Minister. Mandatory Workforce Impact Assessments before AI is deployed at scale. Attached to, but not inside, CAISI so safety and labour evidence inform each other.
This takes 30 seconds.
Add your name.
Sign now ↑
Then send it to at least three people. Ideally more. One signature is a number. Three at a time is how a country moves. That is the only way this works.
