Carney warns Canada of risks relying on U.S. AI providers

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Sunday that the U.S. government's restrictions on artificial intelligence models demonstrate why Canada must diversify its technology suppliers and reduce dependence on American providers.

Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI company, took its latest models — Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — offline Friday to comply with Trump administration directives preventing their use by foreign nationals. The move marks the U.S. government's most significant step to date restricting access to advanced AI models.

"The situation we're in collectively right now with Mythos and Fable is something that can happen with overreliance on certain models," Carney said. "Nobody has done anything wrong in the situation. But we will have done something wrong if we just accept this, don't take the lesson, don't build out and diversify."

Carney made the comments in Ireland ahead of the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, where artificial intelligence will be a major discussion Monday night.

Anthropic said its Mythos model is so advanced it can surpass human cybersecurity experts in finding and exploiting computer vulnerabilities, which is why the company has tightly limited its use. Fable, released publicly this week, is a limited version of Mythos.

Carney linked the AI curbs to Canada's broader push to diversify trade away from the U.S., where more than 70 per cent of Canadian exports currently go. He said Canada has set a goal to double its non-U.S. exports in the next decade. "You'll hear me say this over and over again. It is never a good idea to have one option," he said.