The Morning Download: AI Pushes Deeper Into the Legal Sector

Good morning. Legal startup Harvey AI and Paris-based model developer Mistral AI have deepened their partnership, a reflection of AI’s growing presence in the legal sector.

Mistral will feature on a list of models that San Francisco-based Harvey offers on its platform to help law firms and in-house legal teams streamline work in areas like contract analysis, due diligence, compliance and litigation, the WSJ reports.

That list already includes models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google. Mistral models will initially be available to a few customers based in the European Union ahead of a wider rollout.

Mistral and Harvey announced a collaboration in May 2024 to work out how to support clients. In a joint interview, Mistral Chief Revenue Officer Marjorie Janiewicz and Harvey Chief Operating Officer Katie Burke said the two startups dipped their toes in the water at the time and were jumping in now that Mistral models had evolved.

Burke said over half of Harvey’s customers were outside the U.S. and it was critical for the platform to provide a model that understands a global context and works across multiple languages.

For Mistral, the move represents an opportunity to delve into a niche and highly technical arena where users expect increasingly capable models that understand jurisdictional nuances and comply with data-privacy requirements.

Janiewicz said Mistral had set its sights on financial services and other industries with strong data-protection needs and that it made perfect sense to focus on legal as it also ticked the box around the need for security. “You should definitely expect us to become more and more present in any industry that, as I mentioned, would really value control of the data and also customization,” Janiewicz said.

The legal sector, dense with information and process and populated by highly compensated professionals, is highly susceptible to the influence of AI. Anthropic announced early this year that it was adding open-source plug-ins to Cowork, which lets users assign multistep tasks to its Claude models such as organizing files, drafting documents, extracting data from spreadsheets or synthesizing research. The 11 plug-ins cover a range of things, including the legal profession.

That triggered a selloff in software-as-a-service stocks.

Read more: The availability of AI is facilitating a flood of home-brewed lawsuits, the New York Times reports.

Salesforce and Snowflake, enterprise IT bellwethers, will report earnings this week. Also on deck: Dell. Shares of the technology company jumped more than 4% premarket, on pace to build on Friday’s 17% stock gain.

• Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered, the WSJ reports. “The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem,” he wrote. At the presentation of the 42,300-word encyclical, Leo was accompanied by Christopher Olah, a co-founder and safety researcher at Anthropic, which has tried to position itself as a proponent of AI safety

• Huawei Technologies said it has developed a workaround that will allow it to make chips on par with leading products manufactured by Intel and other top global companies by 2031. The U.S. has blacklisted Huawei since 2019 and has restricted China’s access to advanced semiconductor technologies since 2022.

• The New York Times reports on a hiring boom in cybersecurity, fueled by the rising use of AI to generate code (and sometimes vulnerabilities). In the first quarter job postings were up 11% from the previous year, the NYT reports, citing Glassdoor.

• AI is coming to small business, helping companies to organize supply chains, plan production and execute other functions in ways that only multibillion-dollar enterprises were once able to afford, the WSJ reports. More than 50% of small businesses, including owner-only firms, said they plan to use AI tools this quarter to boost productivity, according to a March survey from Citizens Financial.

• Executives are creating AI versions of themselves trained on their communications and expertise to handle tasks like presentations, interviews, and mentoring, Joann S. Lublin reports for the Journal. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has used his digital twin, Reid AI, to deliver more than 75 addresses and presentations since its 2024 launch.

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