AI Goliath Anthropic looks to shake things up as stock market reacts 📉
Anthropic, one of the biggest names in US artificial intelligence, is edging into the legal market with a new add-on tool and in the process may be forcing City law firms to rethink their reliance on specialist AI platforms.
The San Francisco start-up behind Claude, its large language model designed to generate and analyse text in a conversational way similar to ChatGPT, and reportedly valued at around £250 billion (that’s not a typo!) has rolled out a set of plug-ins for its popular Cowork product, which it says can automate contract review, review NDAs, flag risks and track compliance.
This is likely to concern some of the big-name legal AI platforms, as these are the same common tasks for which many firms have been trialling and adopting their tools, often at great expense. For the past couple of years, many City firms’ AI strategies have followed a familiar pattern, picking a specialist legal tool, integrating it as best they can and then trying to persuade lawyers to actually use it. Could Anthropic’s foray into legal work change that?
The markets have certainly reacted. There have already been significant dips in the share prices of a host of listed publishing and legal software companies, including Relx, the owner of LexisNexis, and Thomson Reuters. It remains to be seen what impact this development is having, or will have, on unlisted AI tech giants, some of which carry valuations in excess of a billion pounds.
Nick West, chief strategy officer and AI lead at law firm Mishcon de Reya, told the Financial Times (£) that the move could “meaningfully compress pricing and reduce demand for legal AI tools”.
In a further twist, several major legal AI platforms, including Harvey and Legora, use a certain large language model to help build their own systems. Can you guess which one? Yes, Claude.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, both companies say they have no plans to adopt Anthropic’s plug-in within their existing products, saying they believe their own tools perform better. Only time will tell.