Astra for Law

Astra for Law was announced by OpenAI on 17 September 2026. It is explicitly not a new model: the company describes it as a configuration of GPT-6 Astra, which is already listed on this board, paired with a dedicated legal search index and instructions written for legal analysis. The index covers more than 230 million sources of United States case law, statutes, regulations and court rules, and the configuration is sold as a research environment for law firms and legal-technology companies rather than as a general assistant. OpenAI publishes a measured comparison rather than an adjective: on 200 United States legal research questions from Vals AI's Legal Research Bench, at its highest reasoning effort, Astra for Law passed correctness checks on 54% of questions against 38.7% for GPT-6 Astra using web search alone — the roughly 40% relative improvement the announcement leads with. It also found 24% more reference cases, retrieved up to 54% more relevant passages from the correct court opinions when compared at the same reasoning effort, and produced answers around twice as long. Every one of those figures is OpenAI's own, measured against its own earlier configuration, on one 200-question benchmark. It launches with 26 partner plugins from firms including Thomson Reuters, Intapp, Harvey, Legora, DeepJudge and iManage, reaching systems such as Relativity, Clio and HighQ, and OpenAI names Latham & Watkins, Ropes & Gray, Cooley and Sullivan & Cromwell as early adopters. Availability is the significant limitation: at announcement it reaches customers through a Trusted Access programme in ChatGPT and Codex, and the API form, gpt-6-astra-law, is described as coming later with no date and no price attached. No price is published for any of it.