TL;DR
OpenAI has launched Astra for Law, a version of its GPT-6 Astra model set up for legal work with a dedicated search index, drafting instructions and firm-level privacy controls. Two established legal AI platforms, Legora and Harvey, are signed up as API customers to build on it. The index covers American law only, which limits what it does for UK practices today.
What OpenAI is selling
Astra for Law combines the model with a legal search index spanning more than 230 million URLs of US case law, statutes, regulations and court rules, topped up daily. A partnership with Free Law Project, which runs CourtListener, supplies its collection of published US precedent. OpenAI says the index sits alongside licensed services such as Thomson Reuters rather than replacing them.
On a Vals AI legal research benchmark of 200 US questions, OpenAI reports Astra for Law passed the overall correctness check 54.0% of the time, against 38.7% for the base model using web search. In a worked example, it says Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 cited a holding that had since been reversed on appeal. These are the vendor’s own tests.
Selected firms get access first through a Trusted Access programme in ChatGPT and Codex, with an API release to follow. Eligible firms receive zero data retention on the API, and ChatGPT Enterprise use is kept out of human review by default. Latham & Watkins is helping design ethical walls and client-instruction controls. Sullivan & Cromwell, Ropes & Gray and Cooley have each built in-house tools with OpenAI engineers, and 26 plugins link ChatGPT to products including Relativity, Clio, iManage and Thomson Reuters’ HighQ.
The UK position
The interesting commercial detail is that Harvey and Legora, both already in use at large UK firms, are listed as customers rather than rivals. OpenAI is positioning itself as the layer underneath the legal AI market, not a competitor to it.
For British firms the gap is obvious. None of the headline research gains apply to English, Welsh or Scottish authorities, and the announcement says nothing about extending the index beyond the US. Firms still carry the duty to verify, which a judge restated this week for litigants in person too, and procurement is where most of their risk is fixed, as advice to law firms set out earlier this week.
Looking forward
Watch whether Harvey and Legora pass Astra’s gains through to UK customers, and whether any British publisher strikes a deal for its case law. Until then, UK firms get the privacy controls and plugins, while the research improvements stay American.