Why does everyone from Wall Street to the White House care so much about Kimi K3?
Earlier this month, when Moonshot, a Chinese AI developer, released its Kimi K3 model , it quickly became a lead story in technology and geopolitics. On Monday, as promised, Moonshot released the model weights for Kimi K3 and working versions of it became available on model hubs hours later.
I’m writing this post to offer a sketch of what all the fuss is about and to follow up on an opinion piece I had in the Globe and Mail last week about open models and the future of AI.
My editorial, titled ‘Canada’s new data centres could be obsolete before they open ,’ was about how smaller open-weight models are improving much faster than expected, and how, soon, more of us will be running AI on our own devices, relying less on AI in the cloud and thus less on large data centres.
The Kimi K3 release is part of this story but points to what’s happening at the higher end of AI development.
My brief snapshot is this:
Jul 27, 2026
Canada launches a public consultation on AI transparency, signaling a future of more frequent notice and more disclosure about risks
Last week, the federal government launched a consultation that will run until mid-September, inviting Canadians to have their say on transparency in artificial intelligence across a range of areas.
The department overseeing this — Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) — also published a detailed discussion paper , titled “Enhancing Trust in Artificial Intelligence Through Increased Transparency.”
Although I suspect it was produced with an AI tool like Deep Research , I found it well worth reading, for the quality of the overview on two fronts: the technological capabilities for transparency across AI and the existing law and policy on point in Canada, Europe, the US, and elsewhere.
At the moment, Canada has many laws touching on the risks and harms arising from AI, but we have no law on AI transparency specifically. Instead we have “The Voluntary Code of Conduct on the Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI Systems ,” which is narrow in scope (only model developers) and voluntary.
The purpose of the present consultation is, as the discussion paper puts it, for the government to gain a better sense of “where transparency about AI systems and AI-generated content matters most to Canadians, where existing practices and frameworks are sufficient, and where further action may be warranted.”
The paper looks at five areas specifically: our encounters with AI-generated content; our interaction with AI tools; information about the models and systems themselves; incidents arising from AI tools; and AI agents.
The paper floats ideas about how to improve transparency on all these fronts. The ideas offer a glimpse of a possible future of AI in Canada in which model creators and users must give more disclosure about risks and more frequent notice about use.
Jul 21, 2026
A global survey shows power continuing to move from publishers to platforms, with AI playing a growing role.
In June, the Reuters Institute at Oxford released its annual Digital News Report , offering a wealth of insight into changes unfolding in news consumption around the world.
The report’s main finding is that for the time in its fifteen-year history, platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube are more popular sources of news, on a global average, than TV and legacy news venues. But only slightly. While some 54 per cent of users report getting their news from platforms, 52 per cent still get it from TV and 51 per cent from news sites and apps directly.
The report contains many other details likely to be helpful to people in all parts of the news ecosystem trying to sort out where things are headed. Among the clearest trends is that people under 35 are moving toward platforms and video, and away from TV, radio, and especially newspapers.
While only 30 per cent of users identify social media and video platforms as their main source of news, and only 12 per cent rely on these exclusively, younger people are much more likely to rely on platforms. The report also finds little reason to expect them simply to adopt the news habits of older generations as they age. Over the past five years, use of news sites and apps has fallen by 12 percentage points, and use of TV news by 13 points.
The drift toward platforms will give companies like Meta and Google and their algorithms increasing power over the way news is shared, presented, and even produced — and therefore, increasing power over the democratic deliberation and debate that once took place mainly through traditional media, including print, radio, and TV.
What about the impact of AI on news consumption?
Jul 7, 2026
Age verification and police reporting obligations on AI will come with a cost
The summer break has given us more time to assess the flurry of bills tabled in Parliament in the final weeks of June relating to privacy, AI, and the internet. One of them, the Safe Social Media Act, in Bill C-34 , has been much in the news in recent weeks, with questions about how the ban on children under 16 holding social media accounts will work and whether it’s constitutional.
I’ve weighed in on whether a ban would infringe young people’s freedom of expression under the Charter, and how the bill’s various obligations on AI providers might change how we interact with chatbots.
Here I address another question people have been asking: how will Bill C-34 affect our privacy? Can age verification be made effective without forcing all of us to divulge and put at risk sensitive information? And would obligations on AI providers to notify police about certain chats make AI less private?
In both cases, we can look to other countries where similar measures have been imposed for evidence of how they affect privacy. We don’t have to speculate.
In short, we can’t have effective age verification or police reporting in AI without harming rights to privacy and expression. The promise of safer social media and AI in C-34 will either have to be broken or bought at too high a cost.
Jun 19, 2026
The House has passed the lawful access bill with amendments, still leaving crucial issues in question
The committee tasked with Bill C-22 worked past midnight Wednesday to meet the government’s goal of completing third reading of the bill before the House took its summer break, which begins today. The government curtailed clause-by-clause review of the bill for this purpose, resulting in the committee’s adopting only a few amendments, and without much discussion or public disclosure.
I highlight two changes worth noting that touch on issues that generated the most criticism during the committee hearings: the bill’s potential impact on encryption and its metadata retention provisions.
The first set is being touted as a step forward, but it may not be.