Police, Fire and Military Are All Shopping for AI Right Now
The agencies that answer your 911 call are quietly buying AI.
A researcher named Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali published a diary of one very long day in Ottawa — 13 hours and 15 minutes, from 7:25am to 8:40pm on September 29, 2026. His goal was blunt: gather information. He hit four events in a single day, including a public-sector AI symposium hosted by Amazon, Accenture and Anthropic, a policy session run by the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and a users conference for Versaterm, a company whose software is used by police, fire and emergency responders.
What stands out is who was in the room. This wasn't a startup pitch night. It was government agencies, defence officials and emergency services figuring out how to plug AI into the work they already do — dispatching ambulances, writing policy, running national security. He skipped a Department of National Defence expo to sleep, then tried to walk in anyway and request a building pass. Staff were baffled, he wrote, because he wasn't a defence contractor or a government employee — just a researcher who wanted to help protect Canadians from AI risks.
He also met Lucid Computing and signed a deal for GPU access — the expensive computing power needed to train and test AI systems. That detail matters because it shows how cheap and ordinary that access has become for individuals, not just big labs. At the AWS afterparty he was passed from an Accenture consultant up to a Deloitte partner. When he asked about AI risks, he got what he called canned modesty, then a warmer conversation once the talk turned to math.
His honest conclusion is that the gap between safety researchers and the people deploying AI in public services is wide, and that senior leaders are increasingly unwilling to say what they actually think about where this is heading. He admits his own approach was messy — he lost his notes, came across as intense, and couldn't get past front desks.
- A single-day visit to Ottawa found Amazon, Accenture, Anthropic, defence officials and emergency-services vendors all working on public-sector AI in the same city on the same day.
- Versaterm makes software for police, fire and emergency crews — meaning AI is heading into the systems that handle your 911 call.
- The researcher was refused a building pass at National Defence because he wasn't a contractor or government employee, showing how hard it is for outside safety experts to get a seat at the table.
- He signed a personal deal for GPU access, a sign that the computing power behind AI is now within reach of individuals, not just major labs.
Why It Matters
AI is entering emergency calls, policing and defence before the rules exist — and you pay for it.