Canada signed the Joint declaration on Paris call for AI safety and security on Monday, the Prime Minister’s Office says. So did Toronto’s Cohere. Here’s what’s in it, who’s missing, and what it changes here.

Who signed

  • Governments (6): Bahrain, Canada, Finland, France, Norway and the Netherlands
  • Companies (10): Anthropic, Black Forest Labs, Cohere, Domyn, Hugging Face, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Sakana AI and Synthesia
  • Civil society: groups including Yoshua Bengio’s LawZero

The U.S. and Chinese governments didn’t sign, and neither did Google or Meta, BetaKit notes. The PMO says the declaration remains open to new endorsements.

What it commits them to

The declaration’s premise is that frontier AI risks cross borders, and that “no actor, be it a State, a company or an international organization, can solely manage all these risks.” Signatories commit to three things:

  1. Shared testing. A common framework and technical standards for evaluating frontier models, focused on misuse in cyberattacks and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, and on losing control of a model. Signatories will publish non-sensitive test results in a standard format in a public repository.
  2. Accountability. Governments commit to legal frameworks that clarify who is liable for “large-scale damages.” AI developers commit to disclosing their models’ capabilities, limits and known risks, supporting independent evaluation, and keeping fail-safe mechanisms to shut down models they control.
  3. Early warning. Rapid alert systems for serious incidents, and confidential whistleblower channels that protect against retaliation.

What it doesn’t do

It’s a declaration, not a treaty. As The Globe and Mail reported, it doesn’t say whether or how the commitments would be enforced.

That gap matters here. Ottawa’s proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act was part of Bill C-27, which stalled in committee and never passed before that Parliament’s session ended in January 2025. ISED’s archived page on the act says that “there is no regulatory framework in Canada specific to AI.” What Ottawa has instead is a voluntary code of conduct for generative AI developers, announced in September 2023.

Why it matters: By signing, Ottawa has promised to clarify liability for large-scale AI harm, which would need a law Canada doesn’t have yet. Watch whether that shows up in legislation, and whether Cohere’s commitments to testing and disclosure turn into published results.