OpenAI's new legal product runs on a database anyone could have indexed
On 17th Sep'26 OpenAI launched Astra for Law. It is not a new model, but GPT-6 Astra wrapped in a legal search index and a set of instructions for legal analysis. The index reaches US case law, statutes, regulations and court rules across more than 230 million URLs, and the case law comes from CourtListener, the free database run by the nonprofit Free Law Project.
On Vals AI's Legal Research Bench it passed the overall correctness check on 54% of 200 questions, against 38.7% for GPT-6 Astra using web search alone. Selected firms reach it through a Trusted Access programme in ChatGPT and Codex, and an API version is promised later with no date or price attached. Harvey and Legora, two of the best-known legal AI companies, are named as API customers.
What it actually means
The moat was never access to the law, because the case law sits in a nonprofit's free database that any team could have indexed. What OpenAI did was the indexing, which is the unglamorous work the market kept filing under plumbing. So run the test on your own product: if your defensibility is that you wired up a public source more carefully than anyone else bothered to, you are holding a lead measured in months rather than years.
Then hold on to the number, because 54% overall correctness is the improved figure and it is still close to a coin flip, which makes this a research assistant rather than research. Harvey and Legora appearing as API customers is the clearest answer yet to what happens when your model provider ships your core feature, and it is not that you die, but that you buy it and move up to the part that involves the client.
The moat was never access to the law.
54%Astra for Law's overall correctness on legal research questions
Source: OpenAI / SiliconANGLE · Friday 18 September 2026