AAR 9/29: Public Sector AI Symposium Ottawa (AWS+Accenture+Anthropic), Policy Foresight Afternoon (Center for International Governance Innovation), Versaterm Users Conference (Police, Fire, Emergen...

Executive Summary

• This report covers a recent visit to the Capital City of Canada.
  • Location(s): The Westin Hotel, CF Rideau Centre, Colonel By Hall uOttawa.
  • Duration of trip: 13 hours and 15 minutes.
  • Time period: From 7:25 to 20:40 on September 29, 2026.
• Primary objective(s): reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.
  • Morning:
    • Skip GCXpo to sleep: OODA loop said risk-reward tradeoff of going 15 km south then back was not worth it. I got called several times during my naps so this wasn't nearly as restful as I'd hoped.
    • Scout Art Gallery of Ottawa: Packing, investigate attendee list, rehearse and study list of 14 shovel ready technical project ideas in compute verification, courtesy of Luke Marks (Martian). I considered a direct approach to Parliament Hall in case I could have a hallway chat with someone about verification but decided it'd risk greatly reducing my credibility if it wasn't well planned out (e.g a preexisting appointment at the bare minimum), easier to call a representative, but very much not my comparative advantage.
  • Afternoon:
    • Lucid Computing meeting: attend office hour, intro, sign deal, get GPUs.
    • CIGI Panel discussions: had to leave in the middle to get a power bank. My mistake was that I wasted time trying to find one on campus after salah at multi-faith centre, I should have gone to Rideau Centre directly. I judged that asking for consent to record may risk violating a social norm, but I lost the notes I took before saving them into persistent storage. People in the room said I came across as intense.
    • Department of National Defence: walk-in, request process to apply for building pass, they get very confused after I clarify that I'm not a defense contractor or government employee in any capacity, just a researcher that wants to work with legitimate authorities to protect Canadians from AI risks, and has relevant expertise and experience for doing so successfully. I show them the business card of my contact, he doesn't pick up the phone, so I walk back to CIGI, he tells me in person to send him an email (???).
  • Evening:
    • Versaterm
      • The inferential gap was too large unfortunately. Weatherradio Canada uses seven standard VHF-FM frequencies ranging from 162.400 MHz to 162.550 MHz and was permanently shut down on March 16, 2026, I wanted to know about the viability of repurposing these bands for issuing rogue agent swarm alerts in futures where internet usability is occasionally heavily impacted by bursts of misaligned large-scale AI activity that is roughly as complex to predict in aggregate as real world weather, but these people just wanted to click on poorly made dashboards and were not the appropriate audience for that sort of conversation.
    • AWS event
      • Was private and ended 17:30. Opus 5.5 medium correctly predicted the afterparty's location, a public venue (1 Rideau St).
      • We were engaged by a Management Consultant at Accenture, who then escalated us to a Partner (typically 15+ years of experience) at Deloitte. Initial questions about personal views on the future of AI and potential risks were deflected with canned displays of modesty that seemed insincere. Thankfully they had a PhD in a quantitative field, and warmed up after we talked math. We chose not to probe re. enterprise deals.
      • Didn't run into anyone from Anthropic there.
      • Contrasted with previous events, it is a change for senior leaders to refuse to expose their internal mental models, and I hope it doesn't stick:
        • Redmond, 2024: VP sketches out concrete case against AGI x-risk (i.e believing control measures would be sufficient for preventing disempowerment, worries of near-term nuclear conflict).
        • Abu Dhabi, 2025: Assistant Undersecretary / Chief AI & Innovation Officer discussing chatbots cites why tool AIs want to be agent AIs.
        • Vancouver, 2025: UK AISI Director chats about his views at The Kent, doesn't respond to follow up questions sent in a DM, but this is clearly because he is really busy and also maybe cyber precautions.