OpenAI Targets Legal Tech Market With Astra for Law
OpenAI has launched an artificial intelligence foundation designed to be used by law firms and legal technology companies to build AI products and workflows, the company said in a Thursday (Sept. 17) blog post.
The new Astra for Law combines OpenAI’s latest and most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, with settings, tools and context tailored for professional legal work, the AI company said. As OpenAI’s frontier models advance, the company will bring these legal capabilities to its latest models, according to the post.
In addition, OpenAI added 26 new ecosystem plugins that connect ChatGPT to specialized tools used by law firms, so users can customize Astra for Law, per the post.
Compared to GPT-6 Astra using web search alone, Astra for Law was 40% more accurate in providing research answers, produced more comprehensive answers, found 24% more reference cases and retrieved 54% more relevant passages from the correct court opinions, the post said.
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OpenAI will initially offer Astra for Law to selected law firms through its Trusted Access in ChatGPT and Codex. The company will soon add the product to its API, according to the post.
“OpenAI is investing in law for the long term,” the company said in the post. “We’ll keep advancing Astra for Law’s model, settings, tools and instructions together, guided by rigorous evaluations and feedback from lawyers and legal technology partners. We’ll also keep improving ChatGPT so firms can build around their expertise and connect the tools they use.”
PYMNTS reported in October 2025 that AI was making inroads into the legal profession and was turning pilot-scale experimentation into production-level automation.
Artificial intelligence systems were becoming embedded infrastructure in law firms and in-house operations, and they were performing research, contracting, compliance and billing, the report said.
In the first nine months of 2025, funding to legal technology startups surpassed $2.4 billion.
AI company Anthropic announced in May that it added several new tools to Claude for the legal industry, including more than 20 Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors that link Claude to legal industry software, and 12 plugins for specific legal work and practice areas.
Anthropic said at the time that “legal professionals have become the most engaged Claude Cowork users of any knowledge-work function.”
