YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Astra for Law

98 points vertigoruntime 50 minutes ago 67 comments

pletnes 42 minutes ago | parent

Just like breaking crypto in the age of cloud is more about cost than time, this will lead to legal attacks based on the same principle. The biggest wallet wins.

mcmcmc 38 minutes ago | parent

That’s how the legal system in the US has always worked though

xmprt 37 minutes ago | parent

> The biggest wallet wins

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.

3asgfq 31 minutes ago | parent

There are other possibilities:

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).

xmprt 16 minutes ago | parent

Many lawyers are owners/partners compared with software engineers who are more like cogs in the machine. They also bill hourly/contingency per case compared to engineers who are salaried. If a partner in a firm thinks they can take on more cases because of AI assistance then they will because that's just more money in their pockets.

umeshunni 37 minutes ago | parent

That's already the case in law because you could just hire the best or most lawyers.

drakythe 36 minutes ago | parent

With regard to certain legal questions this has always been the case. AT&T Fought the US Government for 20 years and eventually won because the government gave up. Without some kind of national anti-SLAPP law we're all one irritated oligarch away from having our lives financially ruined.

I am curious what level of trust established law firms treat LLMs with.

bezko 38 minutes ago | parent

Will it be able to sue itself?

kansface 28 minutes ago | parent

That’s a great question for Astra for Law.

submeta 37 minutes ago | parent

Will these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job?

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.

cjjuice 36 minutes ago | parent

Just a few years ago people were paying 400k for pictures of apes. We always make up new stuff to spend money on.

ceejayoz 31 minutes ago | parent

You know most of that was wash trading, right?

cidd 29 minutes ago | parent

True, unless you're a surgeon.

rsoto2 27 minutes ago | parent

I mean that's what all of these execs are openly telling everyone: they want you out of work, they want their ai to be the one to bring the world to it's knees, they want to surveille every second of your day, they want killer drones to use, they want to lay all of your cities to rubble and build "paradises" on top of them like in gaza.

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

rfgplk 27 minutes ago | parent

> Will these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job?

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.

superxpro12 21 minutes ago | parent

in that case, legal cases would just come down to who has more compute lol. Many times cases win on their merits, but we've also seen evidence where overwhelming legal pressure can influence cases.

spongebobstoes 14 minutes ago | parent

bigger spender already has a huge advantage, up to millions of dollars

this is more likely to democratize the legal system by reducing the cost of a good legal team

rsecora 24 minutes ago | parent

If we have enough energy and raw materials to keep building, yes, it will be an utopia made real. But if there is energy scarcity, then other two outcomes can arise.

porkshoe 7 minutes ago | parent

This also assumes that the AI owners _want_ a global utopia, or that governments will enforce that outcome.

As it stands, it seems far more likely to result in a wonderful life for a few, and an absolute catastrophe for most.

siva7 5 minutes ago | parent

No, it will only leave those without a professional license jobless. Like software developers.

cbg0 37 minutes ago | parent

No word on model hallucinations in the blog post.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra?omniscience...

pelagicAustral 34 minutes ago | parent

Not like common law doesnt already have a lot of hallucination going on.

cobbzilla 29 minutes ago | parent

can “penumbras and emanations” compete with hallucinations?

ch4s3 21 minutes ago | parent

Common law is all about rummaging around in dead mens’ letters, LLMs are a natural fit.

heaney-555 17 minutes ago | parent

The benchmark you linked to shows GPT-6 Astra having the lowest hallucination rate of all tested models.

jdiff 11 minutes ago | parent

The blog post makes no mention. If the rate isn't 0% it should be mentioned for a field like this.

TomGarden 5 minutes ago | parent

Agreed. Hallucinations and reliability are the main hurdles to anything being 'agi' in my book

jrflo 8 minutes ago | parent

Does hallucination matter for this application? We've moved beyond raw recall being that important, it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.

Implicated 4 minutes ago | parent

> it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.

Don't be too sure about that. [0]

0: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

railgunmerlin 35 minutes ago | parent

Interesting to see the callout to companies like harvey in the post itself as consumers rather than competitors? I guess openai isn't quite willing to step into those customer relations themselves?

boredumb 29 minutes ago | parent

memes and snark aside, can you use this to create legitimate terms and contracts for my products and if I do who is getting sued when it is wrong?

hackmack10 25 minutes ago | parent

I already use them for that, they are pretty excellent at it. Much better than the terms of use generator products that used to exist. That said, nobody cares to sue your business for the most part until you're big enough to be worth it. By that time, you'll have a team of legal analyst to assist you... or agents should I say.

Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.

dolebirchwood 25 minutes ago | parent

> who is getting sued when it is wrong?

You. Don't take legal advice from a word calculator.

echelon 24 minutes ago | parent

The business value will be when platforms can underwrite their LLMs' legal products.

That will be a decacorn product or more.

petcat 24 minutes ago | parent

You will be the one getting sued. It's just a tool.

gr_norm 21 minutes ago | parent

I'd expect they could indemnify you against hallucinations or similar if this gets good enough for that to be a very rare occurrence? Or you could buy insurance on it that's cheaper than hiring a lawyer (not a high bar to clear). I wouldn't rely on it currently, though.

raincole 20 minutes ago | parent

> can you use this to create legitimate terms

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.

Thaxll 14 minutes ago | parent

Same for SWE when pushing code they don't understand.

reticulates 6 minutes ago | parent

Solved without AI https://commonpaper.com

https://commonpaper.com/standards

charlesdenault 3 minutes ago | parent

You are.

huseyinkeles 2 minutes ago | parent

when you shoot someone with a gun, who gets sued? you? or the gun manufacturer?

hackmack10 27 minutes ago | parent

People that are saying OpenAI is screwed because a lack of profit, I'm not of that opinion. They are encroaching on every industry they can. They have name brand recognition, a huge user base and are showing they can be a valuable tool to all types of businesses.

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.

superxpro12 23 minutes ago | parent

I'd kill for an AI that can tell me how to fix shit on my own, with proper permitting and building codes factored in.

hackmack10 18 minutes ago | parent

I used ChatGPT the other day to resink a CPU with termal paste, replace a PSU in my PC and snake my kitchen sink from the wall. I didn't exactly need it's help but wanted someone looking over my shoulder so to speak. It can help you repair all types of stuff, but as far as county / building codes and such, that probably isn't far off. It seems to understand things quite well.

swed420 23 minutes ago | parent

> We have big problems for humanity.

The biggest problem is that we're conditioned by a paradigm that frames these as problems.

mawadev 21 minutes ago | parent

I think the future is going to look pretty boring, we are all going to review and put our signature below LLM generated output...

WarmWash 18 minutes ago | parent

By that point money ceases to have value, because the value of money comes from the motivation it gives people to work. If AI does everything, then money is useless (unless AI like money for some reason).

ReptileMan 6 minutes ago | parent

As one wise man said - the oldest profession will also be the last to go.

mcmcmc 2 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

jumploops 19 minutes ago | parent

The courts are about to overrun with AI-generated lawsuits (even more so than they have been[0]).

[0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...

pampas 18 minutes ago | parent

They seem unaccountable. Every other profession has increased their productivity.

officeplant 2 minutes ago | parent

>Every other profession has increased their productivity.

You dropped this /s

ngruhn 10 minutes ago | parent

Why the hell are they not fighting fire with fire? This is not sustainable. But it is annoying that the AI labs get to play arms dealer, selling to both sides.

paimapi 9 minutes ago | parent

you could probably write a cool little gotcha of an SF short story about a barren wasteland of a planet that keeps broadcasting out legalese that's revealed to just be LLM chatbot lawyers pedantically arguing with one another about xeno legal doctrine

piker 19 minutes ago | parent

Second paragraph:

> 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."

forrestthewoods 14 minutes ago | parent

If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.

elpakal 12 minutes ago | parent

> By using the legal search index, Astra for Law can search U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. Our work with Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, brings its case-law collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law (opens in a new window) into this research experience.

Found that to be very interesting

ericd 10 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, it should be freely available, you have to be able to know the rules you're supposed to obey in order to obey them well. I've been making a free API for US law search, you can point whatever model you want at it: https://law.agentlookups.ai/

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.

dzonga 18 minutes ago | parent

open-ai have proven they can make good / decent models but business strategy is just spray and pray.

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.

estetlinus 16 minutes ago | parent

Do they still do Atlas, the web browser? They are indeed throwing shit at the wall, seeing what stick.

scrollop 14 minutes ago | parent

a la Google.

WarmWash 16 minutes ago | parent

Cool, now you can pay an attorney $500/hr for them to prompt Astra for 30 minutes, and bill you like they spent the normal 8 hours on the case.

hahajk 7 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps, but then someone would do the same but bill you for 7 hours, someone else would undercut them again, until the price reaches a lower equilibrium.

gabhuzk 11 minutes ago | parent

Law is a solved problem.

elpakal 9 minutes ago | parent

where are the benchmarks

slowhadoken 7 minutes ago | parent

Wouldn’t this and similar efforts to centralize bureaucracy make AI the new gatekeeper? Without reliable transparent models we’re just trusting OpenAI instead of a hundred top legal firms.

Ecstatify 2 minutes ago | parent

Seems like another “product” that will be killed in 6 months, but is good for the IPO so they can say they solved law.