> API customers including Harvey and Legora will be able to build on Astra for Law, bringing this intelligence into their own products and workflows.
In other words: "no, no, we're not eating our children to prep for the IPO. Don't worry."
OpenAI didn't need to name Legora and Harvey in the second paragraph of the launch post.
They are pre-empting the obvious interpretation of Astra for Law: that moving this far up the legal stack puts them in direct competition with their biggest legal AI customers.
“Don't worry, they can build on us” is a pretty conspicuous message to include on launch day.
They have clearly thought about some pessimistic outcomes.
Very much a work in progress, only federal and state so far, no municipal codes yet, and no case law yet. Big hole, I know. Also working on making the search ranking work better.
Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...
Found that to be very interesting
[0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...
the cost of making a legal argument can collapse while the cost of reaching an enforceable, legitimate decision may go higher, which will gate the "justice" system even more.
You dropped this /s
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra?omniscience...
Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?
Don't be too sure about that. [0]
It's analogous to crypto. Started from some noble anti-authoritarian ideas and morphed into machine that removes any friction for capital - whoever has the most money will keep gaining the most.
You. Don't take legal advice from a word calculator.
I don't think you can. What I get from this article is that this is not a product they're going to sell to average consumers.
Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.
they need to pick a lane and optimize for it. coz at their size they can't serve the application layer (a.i startups who can fine-tune models will eat their lunch)
if they gonna do a consumer play - then go ham on that.
otherwise they're gonna get caught in the dreaded middle valley.
Is the play here a set of specialized harnesses using their best general model?
This was already always the case. If anything, making this more accessible will reduce the barrier to entry for whether or not it's worth your time to take on a case. Instead of 50 lawyers spending 100s of hours on a case, you can have 1 or 2 lawyers + Astra working on it and if there's a case you can add more real lawyers.
1) Lawyers are not as naive as software engineers and will fight being replaces by new laws.
2) If they are replaced, OpenAI will take a cut commensurate with the amount in dispute (OAI, please credit me for the idea in the IPO brochure).
I am curious what level of trust established law firms treat LLMs with.
As much as I hate to see it. They are now threatening industries like Engineers, Game Developers, Accountants, 3D modelers, 3D animators, Video Production, Audio Production, Therapist, Tax Auditors, Journalists, Authors, Artists, Mathematicians, Product managers, Every type of analyst and pretty much any other job that can be done behind a computer screen.
We have big problems for humanity.
Real estate, food, energy, mobility.
That will be done with money. Or violence. Either way, a scary future to people when labor doesn't provide any value. Elon promises abundance, but what can he do against greed?
The biggest problem is that we're conditioned by a paradigm that frames these as problems.
In the real world, lawyers submit detailed bills and their clients examine them. If you don’t, that’s on you.
If the benefits were shared across humanity, that could bring us closer to utopia. My worry is that we’ll instead end up with a handful of even wealthier billionaires and millions of people out of work.
Effectively yes, in the current forms. Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc) are all dead.
this is more likely to democratize the legal system by reducing the cost of a good legal team
Same argument for plumbers. Everyone always jokes about what a good time it is to be a plumber. But what happens when all the software engineers turn to plumbing? Suddenly it's not such a good time to be a plumber anymore.
They also openly tell you what they are afraid of btw: collective worker power. something that is massively lacking in our industry, although i feel like it would be one of the easiest industries to unionize in terms of # of workers.
Interesting interview I just watched about how powerful and dangerous these "wishes" or "prophecies" are especially in the hands of the ultra-wealthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7grHa1NR0