Canada's Federal AI Register — the First National Inventory of Government AI, Built to Include the Tools That Process Citizens' Own Access Requests

On 28 November 2025, Treasury Board President Shafqat Ali launched the Government of Canada's first public AI Register, fulfilling a commitment in the federal public service's 2025-2027 AI Strategy and disclosing where and how AI is being explored, developed or deployed across government.

The register aims to give citizens a standing public view of which AI systems their government uses, including the tools that departments now use to process Canadians' own Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests.

At launch the register compiled self-reported input from 42 institutions covering more than 400 AI systems, including ATIPXpress, an AI-assisted case-management platform used across multiple federal departments that adds natural-language search, automated workflows and history-based redaction suggestions for ATIP analysts to accept or reject, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's Document Detective tool, which helps ATIP teams find duplicate or near-duplicate records; the Treasury Board Secretariat also coordinates an Informal Network on AI and Automation in ATI so departments can compare notes.

The register launched with more than 400 AI systems logged across 42 institutions, providing the first standing public mechanism, refreshed on an ongoing basis, for citizens to see which AI tools their government uses on their own information requests.

The register is explicitly described as a minimum viable product rather than a finished audit, since it depends entirely on institutions self-reporting their own AI use, and neither the launch materials nor independent reporting yet quantify how much AI-assisted redaction has actually shortened ATIP processing times.