Harvey's first LLM for legal work is here

Harvey cofounder Gabe Pereyra.

Harvey Legal tech giant Harvey has announced its first in-house, proprietary AI model, Tenet.

The model is designed to handle legal work typically done by lawyers over many hours, at lower cost.

The move clears a path for Harvey to someday help law firms train custom models on their data.

Harvey built an $11 billion legal-software business on top of other companies' AI models.

Now it's trying to prove it can build one of its own.

On Tuesday, Harvey introduced Harvey Tenet, its first in-house, proprietary model for legal work.

Tenet is designed to help Harvey's software take on more of the tasks typically done by lawyers over hours or days, at a lower cost than the third-party models it relies on.

The move comes as the companies behind the biggest general-purpose models are circling the legal market.

Anthropic has been chasing lawyers with plugins for document review and drafting, while OpenAI has hired Ironclad founder Jason Boehmig to lead its push into legal.

Google and Meta may not be far behind.

Their sudden interest raises an uncomfortable question for Harvey.

What happens when your supplier decides it wants your customers, too? And how long until one of them catches up to Harvey? Building a bespoke model could give Harvey more control over both its costs and its fate.

Like many startups, Harvey builds on a smorgasbord of models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.