Canada Is Renting Its AI Future

We would never let another country control Canada's power grid.

So why are we handing them control of our AI?

Almost every Canadian company now runs its AI on models built and owned in another country. Not hosted here. Not ours. Rented, through an API, from a company that can change the terms, the price, or the access whenever it chooses.

This year, it did. The US restricted access to Anthropic's Fable 5 — one of the most capable models in the world — for everyone outside its borders. For a few weeks, Canadian businesses were cut off from a tool they'd built on. A preview of the leverage someone else now holds over us.

AI is becoming infrastructure — the electricity of the next economy. The thing our banks, hospitals, and businesses will all run on. You don't rent that from someone who can shut off the tap.

Some of this is being taken seriously. The Bell–Cohere partnership is building real AI infrastructure on Canadian soil, and that matters. (Full disclosure: I'm an investor in Cohere.) But Cohere has chosen not to chase the frontier — they're focused on enterprise and government, where control matters more than raw intelligence. Smart for them. Not a complete answer for the country.

Because Canadian businesses can't afford to run a generation behind. Founders go where the intelligence is — we always will. Canadians deserve the best models, not a patriotic second-best.

So sovereignty can't mean building one national champion to rival the giants. It means being able to run the best models ourselves.

The strongest open models are now nearly as capable as the closed ones. Many are Chinese — which raises a fair concern: can we trust them with our data?

That fear is actually the argument.

The moat isn't owning a model. It's the expertise to take any open model, inspect it, strip out what we don't trust, and run it sealed on our own hardware — where no data leaves Canadian soil. Do that, and the model's origin stops mattering. A model you've torn open and run in your own building can't phone home to anyone.

That know-how compounds. No one can switch it off. And we don't have to build it alone — this is exactly the capability to develop with trusted allies who face the same dependence.

A country that can't be unplugged. That's sovereignty — and it's well within our reach.

We have the talent. We have the ground to run it on. What we need now is the will to treat this as what it is: infrastructure worth owning.

Let's stop renting our future. We can build this.