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Joelle Pineau

Chief AI Officer, Cohere

Search every verified Joelle Pineau interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer at Cohere, has been a prominent voice in recent discussions on AI safety, sovereign AI, and enterprise adoption. At Bloomberg Tech 2026, she discussed emerging AI risks and guardrails, advocating for common standards for transparency and measurement, and expressed optimism about AI's potential for productivity and scientific discovery while emphasizing the need to build observability infrastructure. She also stressed that every organization must use AI to strengthen its own cyber defenses, citing the growing volume and complexity of attacks. In late October 2026, Cohere announced the initial close of a Series E round targeting up to C$7 billion, which Pineau described as enabling the company to compete globally while focusing on enterprise and government solutions. She has argued that building frontier AI outside the US and China is viable, calling it "a choice" and disagreeing with the premise that those two countries are the only paths forward. Pineau has also highlighted Canada's challenges, including difficult venture capital conditions and high infrastructure costs, while asserting that the "only way to lose is to stop running." Cohere signed an agreement to become the first transatlantic sovereign AI solution through a partnership with Germany's Aleph Alpha, which Pineau framed as addressing demand for models tailored to government and enterprise requirements around safety and compliance. She has consistently supported open-weight models, stating that when done thoughtfully, they can lead to safer technology and encourage a diversity of builders.

Recent appearances

  • Can AI Safety Keep Pace With Frontier Models?

    Dan Lahav, Co-Founder & CEO, Irregular and Joëlle Pineau, Chief AI Officer, Cohere, discuss emerging AI risks, credible guardrails and accountability as frontier models advance with Bloomberg’s Parmy Olson at Bloomberg Tech 2026 in London. -------- Subscribe to Bloomberg Live on YouTube:    / @bloomberg_live  

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  • Building Secure AI in Canada | Aidan Gomez and Joëlle Pineau

    Who builds the AI we depend on, how it is developed and where Canadian talent can grow are questions that matter beyond the technology sector. Minister Evan Solomon speaks with Cohere's Aidan Gomez and AI researcher Joëlle Pineau about building trustworthy AI, turning research into opportunity and what Canada needs to compete globally while maintaining the capacity to make its own choices. 🇨🇦 Who develops the AI we depend on, how it is designed, and where Canadian talent can thrive: these questions go far beyond the technology sector. Minister Evan Solomon speaks with Cohere's Aidan Gomez an…

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  • AI Attacks Will Overwhelm Corporate Defenses | Joelle Pineau

    Cohere Chief AI Officer Joelle Pineau discusses the company's massive Series E fundraise, expanding enterprise deployments, and building frontier AI models outside the US and China. She also breaks down Cohere's acquisition of Prague-based cybersecurity harness startup Aisle and the imperative for organizations to use AI for defense. Check out our sponsor Lovable: https://lovable.dev. Turn ideas into software people love. — https://x.com/joellepineau — MTS is a live news and interview show covering technology, business, politics, and culture as it happens. Follow MTS: X |   / mtslive   YouTube…

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  • Souveraineté numérique : le Canada a-t-il encore une chance? Avec Joëlle Pineau

    On a inventé l'IA au Canada… pis on regarde les Américains et les Chinois partir avec le jackpot. Enregistré live à All In 2026, au Palais des congrès de Montréal, cet épisode pose la question qui dérange : est-ce qu'on a déjà perdu la course? Dans cet épisode, Étienne Crevier et Dominic Gagnon reçoivent Joëlle Pineau, Chief AI Officer chez Cohere, ex-leader de la recherche en IA chez Meta (FAIR) et professeure à McGill. Prédire l'avenir de l'IA, est-ce de l'astrologie? C'est quoi, un kill switch, et pourquoi ton entreprise devrait s'en inquiéter? Comment convaincre Mark Zuckerberg de donner…

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  • HumanX Panel: Joelle Pineau, Umesh Sachdev & Jelle Prins on Sovereign AI

    As AI becomes critical to global economic growth, security, and enterprise infrastructure, leaders are racing to build sovereign capabilities. What does AI sovereignty really mean for nations and global businesses, and what will it take to build competitive, resilient ecosystems? In this high-level panel from HumanX Amsterdam, industry leaders gather to break down the geopolitics, infrastructure, and technology stacks shaping the future of AI. Featured Speakers: Lisa Oder (Moderator) – Editor, Tagesspiegel Background Joelle Pineau – Chief AI Officer, Cohere Umesh Sachdev – CEO & Co-founder,…

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  • Joelle Pineau on Why Sovereign AI Just Got Real // AI Inside #133

    Days after the US government forced Anthropic to pull Mythos 5 and Fable 5 offline, Cohere Chief AI Officer Joelle Pineau joins Jason Howell to react. The former Meta FAIR leader makes the case for sovereign AI, models that enterprises run on their own terms, on-premise and under their control, and explains why the shutdown was a wake-up call for everyone depending on a single provider. Also in this conversation: why Cohere open-sourced its North Mini Code model, what stops an agent from taking an action it shouldn't, how AI is changing entry-level work, and where AI actually belongs in medic…

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  • Canada’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy: An Interview with the Head of AI at Cohere

    While artificial intelligence (AI) is often associated with job losses, the Canadian government under Mark Carney estimates it could create up to 250,000 jobs within five years. “We have a lot to gain by developing this here,” says Joëlle Pineau, head of AI at Cohere, in an interview with Patrice Roy. For more information, read our article: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/... To stay up-to-date on political news, subscribe to our newsletter: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/infolettr... #AI #economy #politics #TJ18h -- Subscribe to our Radio-Canada News channel to follow live news from Can…

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  • Open Science and AI Foundation Models: Allies in the Pursuit of Knowledge - Joelle Pineau

    This talk will provide new perspectives on the trajectory of AI in 2024, from research to product. We will explore how open science provides a powerful paradigm to ensure new AI foundation models are developed and deployed in a way that is transparent and responsible, while enabling speed and scale of innovation across the ecosystem. Joelle Pineau, Professor and William Dawson Scholar, School of Computer Science, McGill University; VP, AI Research, Meta

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  • MASTERCLASS: Transforming personalized health care with AI, Joëlle Pineau

    MASTERCLASS: Transforming personalized health care with AI Joëlle will expand on her Headliner presentation about recent developments in AI and discuss exciting progress in using machine learning to accelerate the discovery of personalized treatment strategies and the development of data-driven health care solutions, and invite discussion on this topic. Joëlle Pineau, Co-Managing Director, Facebook AI Research; Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar, School of Computer Science, McGill University

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  • An honest look at AI agents | Pioneers of AI

    We may have reached the “ChatGPT moment” in agentic AI. Over the past couple weeks, an open-source AI agent called OpenClaw (previously known as Clawdbot) has taken the AI world by storm. It boasts nearly 200,000 stars on Github and has adopters scrambling to buy Mac Minis to run the program locally. The lobster-themed agent works like an ultra-fast, super-smart personal assistant capable of answering emails, booking flights, ordering coffee, managing calendars, updating its source code, and much more without human intervention. However, it’s also raised some major concerns around privacy and…

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  • AI's Research Frontier: Memory, World Models, & Planning — With Joelle Pineau

    Joelle Pineau is the chief AI officer at Cohere. Pineau joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss where the cutting edge of AI research is headed — and what it will take to move from impressive demos to reliable agents. Tune in to hear why memory, world models, and more efficient reasoning are emerging as the next big frontiers, plus what current approaches are missing. We also cover the “capability overhang” in enterprise AI, why consumer assistants still aren’t lighting the world on fire, what AI sovereignty actually means, and whether the major labs can ever pull away from each other. Hit pla…

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  • Radical Talks, Masterclass Edition: Joelle Pineau on Turning AI Research into Real World Impact

    Joelle Pineau is one of the architects behind modern AI — and as Chief AI Officer at Cohere, she’s focused on turning breakthrough research into real-world impact. In this special episode of Radical Talks, recorded live at Radical Ventures’ AI Founders Masterclass, Joelle joins Radical Partner Sanjana Basu to explore how frontier AI actually makes its way from the lab into the enterprise. Drawing on her experience building FAIR at Meta and now leading applied AI at Cohere, Joelle shares how leadership judgment, culture, and rigor shape what gets built and what ultimately lasts. Along the way,…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I've been an advocate of open weight models for many years. I deeply believe that when done right, when done in a thoughtful way, this actually leads to safer technology in the long run. And so I always thought about it a little bit the other way around. It's not like, how safe is it to release this model, it's what do you need to do to guarantee that your open weight model is going to be safe? What do you need to bu”

“You do need a lot of resources to compete, that is true, and that's why we just raised the largest round for a technology company in Canadian history, is to get those resources to compete. But the other thing is it's not just a who can spend the most money competition. You can be much more strategic about where you deploy resources and the types of models that you build, and not just pursuing the most expensive, the ”

“The first thing to say is if you're not building it, you don't control it. You're not in a position to make the decisions about deployment, about safety, because someone else is controlling those decisions. And so by having a Canadian company that is in the seat of control over the technology, we as Canadians have much more influence about how that goes and how it gets deployed. We do a lot of work and invest very he”

“The piece of the conversation that maybe wasn't as developed with relation to the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident was how much every organization, institution today has to be thinking about its own cyber security defenses. It's not necessarily about just building the right agents. It's actually about using AI to build your defenses. And given the volume, the complexity of attacks these days, if companies are not thi”

“I disagree very strongly with that premise to the point, you know, that is why I've, you know, decided to join Cohere and to really help them grow their AI strategy. I think in many ways building for the frontier is a choice. You can choose to build frontier technology in terms of the actual recipe, the you know, it's pretty well known how to do it. There's enough circulation of talent between the different labs from”

“The investments, the venture capital, continue to be very difficult here. It's the relationship to risk-taking. The cost of computers, of all the infrastructure, is incredible. And even if you manage to get the funding, we receive quotes with 48 hours to give a response on enormous expenses because the market is so volatile. So it's the capital, it's the GPUs. After that, it's the talent, keeping researchers invested”

Other executives at Cohere

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