The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology is one of several House and Senate committees currently grappling with legal, regulatory and policy challenges and opportunities presented by AI. I appeared before the committee yesterday alongside Yoshua Bengio and Colin Bennett. Bengio unsurprisingly garnered the lion’s share of the questions, but the committee did give me the chance to highlight my thoughts on policy priorities and to address a few questions. I plan to post some reflections on the policy tensions in the coming days. In the meantime, the video and text of my opening statement are posted below.
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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.
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 259: The Privacy and Surveillance Risks of AI Chatbot Reporting to Police
Over the past ten days, Canada has witnessed one of the fastest-moving technology policy debates in recent memory. What began as reporting about a tragic act of violence – the shootings in Tumbler Ridge, BC – quickly evolved into questions about AI safety, corporate responsibility, police reporting obligations, and now potential AI regulation.
This week’s Law Bytes podcast is a bit different from the norm. Building off my Globe and Mail op-ed, I walk through what has happened thus far, examine the potential policy responses, and explain why both the Online Harms Act and current AI legislative models are poorly suited to this problem, and argue that Canada instead needs to start thinking seriously instead about an AI Transparency Act.
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 258: Jaxson Khan With an Insider Perspective on AI Policy Development in Canada
Earlier this month, the government quietly released a “what we heard” report this discussing the response to its 30-day sprint AI consultation from last October. The consultation was promoted as giving Canadians – including a 28 person expert advisory board – the chance to provide their views on AI as the AI Minister Evan Solomon works toward a national AI strategy. The consultation garnered some criticism for its speed and missing perspectives on the expert panel. More recently on the use of AI to assess the results have sparked further doubts about it.
Jaxson Khan is the CEO and Founder of Aperature AI and a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. But before that, he served as Senior Policy Advisor the Minister of Innovation Science and Industry, where AI was one of his lead responsibilities. Jaxson joins the Law Bytes podcast to provide an insider perspective on AI policy development along with his thoughts on the AI consultation and its results.
An Illusion of Consensus: What the Government Isn’t Saying About the Results of its AI Consultation
The government quietly released a “what we heard” report this week discussing the response to its 30-day sprint AI consultation from last October. Described as the “largest public consultation in the history of ISED”, the report relies heavily on AI for its analysis as the government notes that it used “Cohere Command A, OpenAI GPT-5 nano, Anthropic Claude Haiku and Google Gemini Flash to read through the submissions and identify common themes.” Given that it received 64,600 responses to 26 questions, it says AI enabled it to shrink a process that would typically take many months into a matter of weeks.
In addition to the public consultation survey, AI Minister Evan Solomon formed a 28 person expert committee that provided the government with 32 different papers and reports. Those documents were similarly subject to AI analysis with the “what we heard” report devoting several pages to the expert analysis and recommendations. Yet unlike the public survey responses, the government has posted all the experts’ reports, which allows the public to see the actual advice alongside the government’s summary of it.
Since the government used AI to summarize the expert reports, I thought I would do the same.
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The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 263: The Lawful Access Act Roundtable With David Fraser and Robert Diab
