Just over a month ago, the Ford government tabled Bill 97, an omnibus bill with provisions fundamentally restructuring Ontario’s access to information system. Information and Privacy Commissioner Patricia Kosseim responded with alarm, but the government rushed ahead with no hearings or public debate. The most significant rewrite of Ontario’s access to information regime in nearly forty years became law within weeks. Justin Safayeni, a partner at Stockwoods LLP in Toronto, is one of Canada’s leading practitioners in access to information and media law. He joins me on the Law Bytes podcast to make sense of what just happened and what comes next.
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The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 265: Jason Millar on Claude Mythos, Project Glasswing, and the Governance Crisis in Frontier AI
In a year in which AI has truly dominated much of the news cycle, the story of Anthropic’s Mythos may be the biggest story of them all. A version of the popular Claude AI service is reportedly so powerful that the company can’t release it to the public yet. As governments race to meet with company officials, there are serious cybersecurity risks, prompting many leading software companies to join a new working group to get ahead of the issue before the AI model is publicly released.
Jason Millar is a colleague at the University of Ottawa, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in the Ethical Engineering of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. He joins the Law Bytes podcast to talk about Anthropic’s Mythos, the AI governance challenges, the importance of distinguishing between AI security and AI safety, and what governments should be doing to address this latest AI challenge.
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 264: Jon Penney on Chilling Effects in the Digital Age
“Chilling effects” is a term people hear all the time: in court rulings, in debates over content moderation, in dealing with online harms, or in news coverage of surveillance and legal reforms. The focus is typically on how legal rules may make speaking out more challenging, risky, or even dangerous. But what if our understanding of chilling effects actually understates the issue?
Jon Penney is a law professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and the author of a new book from Cambridge University Press titled Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age. The book forces us to rethink chilling effects with significant implications for a wide range of digital public policies. Jon joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss the book and what his findings mean for future legal and regulatory reforms.
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 263: The Lawful Access Act Roundtable With David Fraser and Robert Diab
Lawful access is back. The decades-long battle has entered a new phase with the introduction of Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act. This bill follows last spring’s attempt to bury lawful access provisions in Bill C-2, a border measures bill. The latest bill covers the two main aspects of lawful access: law enforcement access to personal information held by communication service providers such as ISPs and wireless providers, and the development of surveillance and monitoring capabilities within Canadian networks.
To discuss the latest iteration of lawful access, I’m joined on the Law Bytes podcast by David Fraser and Robert Diab for a roundtable discussion of the key elements of the proposed legislation. David is one of Canada’s leading privacy lawyers and a partner with McInness Cooper in Halifax, and Robert is a law professor at Thompson Rivers University in BC and the co-author of a book on search and seizure law.
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 262: Zack Shapiro on the Claude AI Native Law Firm
What are the limits of using AI to help run a legal practice? There is much discussion about what an AI future might look like, but with the rapid development of AI tools, the future may be now. The hot AI service of the moment is Claude AI, which targets various verticals, including software development and legal services. Zack Shapiro is a New York lawyer and the founder of the Rains law firm. He is a Yale Law School grad who clerked in the U.S. federal courts and practiced at Davis Polk in New York. In a trio of recent articles, he draws on his own experience to argue that the general-purpose AI service is already sufficiently powerful to have a transformative effect on legal practice. He joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss how he did it and what it might mean for the future of legal services.
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The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 266: Justin Safayeni on the Ontario Government’s Overnight Evisceration of Access to Information 
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