Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Bonjour.
I'm Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been doing AI research for many years. I'm also the chair and founder of Future of Life Institute, which Anthony mentioned, which is the oldest and largest AI watchdog in the world.
Just the other week I had the great honour to listen to your Prime Minister, Mark Carney, while I was in Davos. I was very inspired by his speech. I'm going to follow his lead here, both to speak truth to power like Professor Aguirre and Professor Krueger did and, in particular, to speak very honestly about the world as it is.
The current situation with AI is truly insane. In the U.S. and also in Canada right now, there is less regulation on AI than on sandwiches. That means if I opened a café in Montreal, Toronto or Ottawa, and the health inspector came in and said, “Hey, you have 52 rats in your kitchen. I'm not going to allow you to sell any sandwiches at this point,” I could simply come back and say, “Well, don't worry. I'm actually not going to sell any sandwiches. I'm just going to sell an AI girlfriend for 12-year-olds. I know there have been some issues with child suicide and so on from chatbots, but I have a better feeling about mine.” The guy from the government would have to say, “Okay, fine,” because it's legal. I could say that I'm not going to sell any sandwiches, that I'm just going to release the superintelligence, which you've heard about from Professor Krueger and Professor Aguirre, that companies are closer to figuring out how to build now than they are closer to figuring out how to control them. Again, the inspector would have to say, “Okay, go ahead. It's completely legal.” In fact, there is a gentleman in Canada who has organized a network where he's tracked down over 300 victims of chatbots that have caused suicide among children, psychosis and so on. It's absolutely absurd that selling these sorts of products with no predeployment testing is legal. What can be done about this?
Canada has two superpowers at the moment. You have an unusually bold Prime Minister and leadership, and you also happen to have some of the best AI research in the world, in places like Montreal, Waterloo, Toronto and many other universities. The first way to push back against this crazy stuff that's happening—manifested most recently in the last week by Moltbook, where you have over a million AI agents autonomously writing messages to each other about how they should maybe get rid of humans and talk to each other without humans being able to see what they do—is to simply start treating AI companies like you would treat any other company in any other industry in Canada by finding safety standards. Before someone could roll out a new chatbot or AI companion for kids in Canada, they would have to undergo some quick clinical trials to make sure that the benefits actually outweigh the harms, in the way a pharma company would have to make sure that a new pill for kids doesn't increase suicidal ideation.
If you do this, the American companies are going to start squealing. The first thing that would happen is they will squeal and say, “Then we're going to have to completely leave Canada,” just like OpenAI threatened to leave the European Union if the EU AI Act passed. You pass your law anyway, and they're going to stay in Canada, just like OpenAI is still in the European Union. That also protects you against all the loss of control risks, which you heard about from Professor Krueger and Professor Aguirre, because your law also will not let people release products if they can't prove they won't make bioweapons for terrorists or overthrow the Canadian government. As I said, right now, nobody has a clue about making any kind of guarantees of that sort on the AI products that they make.
What's going to happen instead is there will be a golden age of AI in Canada, with companies releasing tools that can be controlled and that don't cause kids to commit suicide or do any of the other bad stuff, just like the pharma industry in Canada is very healthy and productive by using safety standards.