{"id":99669,"date":"2025-05-14T02:45:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T02:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/99669\/"},"modified":"2025-05-14T02:45:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T02:45:11","slug":"anthropic-google-score-win-by-nabbing-openai-backed-harvey-as-a-user","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/99669\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic, Google score win by nabbing OpenAI-backed Harvey as a user"},"content":{"rendered":"

Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond strictly using OpenAI\u2019s, Harvey announced<\/a> in a blog post on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

This is noteworthy because Harvey is one of the OpenAI Startup Fund\u2019s most successful early-backed portfolio companies. The OpenAI Startup Fund is an OpenAI-associated fund<\/a> to back companies developing products on top of AI technologies, primarily OpenAI\u2019s own. While Harvey says it\u2019s not abandoning OpenAI, merely adding more models and clouds, this is still a huge coup for OpenAI\u2019s big competitors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Harvey is one of the first four startups that the OpenAI Startup Fund backed, it said in December 2022<\/a>. That was back when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a> was still running the fund. (The others in that first cohort include Descript, Mem, and Speak.)<\/p>\n

Harvey, which has grown like mad since then, is now a $3-billion-valuation startup, it said in February, when it announced<\/a> a $300 million Series D led by Sequoia, with other big names like Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, and the OpenAI Fund piling in.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Google\u2019s venture arm, GV, led Harvey\u2019s $100 million Series C<\/a> in July 2024 (and the OpenAI Fund participated in that round, too). But Harvey didn\u2019t immediately adopt Google\u2019s AI models after it put Google\u2019s corporate venture firm on its cap table. (GV participated in Harvey\u2019s Series D as well.)<\/p>\n

So, what convinced Harvey to move beyond OpenAI\u2019s models now? The startup\u2019s internally developed benchmark, dubbed BigLaw, showed that a wide variety of foundation models are growing increasingly adept at a range of legal tasks and some are better at specific tasks than others.<\/p>\n

Instead of spending its efforts training models, Harvey figured, it could simply embrace high-performing, reasoning foundation models from other vendors (e.g. Google and Anthropic via Amazon\u2019s cloud) and then fine-tune them for the legal market.<\/p>\n

Using a variety of models will also help as Harvey creates AI agents, the company says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn less than a year, seven models (including three non-OAI models) now outperform the originally benchmarked Harvey system on BigLaw Bench,\u201d Harvey wrote in the blog post.<\/p>\n

Harvey\u2019s benchmark also showed that different foundation models are better at specific legal tasks than others. For instance, it says Google\u2019s Gemini 2.5 Pro \u201cexcels\u201d at legal drafting but \u201cstruggles\u201d with pre-trial tasks like writing oral arguments because the model doesn\u2019t fully understand \u201ccomplex evidentiary rules like hearsay.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s o3 does such pre-trial tasks well, according to Harvey\u2019s testing, with Anthropic\u2019s Claude 3.7 Sonnet following close behind. <\/p>\n

\"HarveyResults from Harvey\u2019s internal benchmarkingImage Credits:<\/strong>Harvey<\/p>\n

In its blog post, Harvey says that it will also now join the growing ranks of those sharing a public leaderboard<\/a> of model benchmark performance. Its board will rank how major reasoning models are doing on legal tasks.\u00a0And the company won\u2019t just boil rankings down to a single number, but will also publish research where \u201ctop lawyers provide nuanced insights into model performance not captured by single-score benchmarks.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, not only is OpenAI-backed Harvey adopting competitors\u2019 models, it is also amping up the pressure on its backers (including Google) to keep proving themselves. Not that OpenAI should worry much on that score. While AI benchmarking is growing increasingly complex and somewhat political<\/a>, this is a world where OpenAI still shines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are incredibly fortunate to have OpenAI as an investor in Harvey and key collaborator in our product,\u201d Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg told TechCrunch in a statement. \u201cAnd, we are energized to add to our options for customers as we continue to serve the needs of our customers globally.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,5889,1942,867,30532,46287,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-99669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-benchmarks","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-google","12":"tag-harvey","13":"tag-openai-fund","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114503897757098040","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}