OpenAI launches Astra for Law
OpenAI has released Astra for Law, a legal-tuned configuration of GPT‑6 Astra that it says nearly doubles the relative accuracy of its frontier model on a third-party legal research benchmark.
OpenAI said Astra for Law pairs GPT‑6 Astra with a legal search index covering U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules and administrative decisions across more than 230 million URLs, updated daily, plus custom instructions for legal analysis and writing. Work with the Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, brings a case-law collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law into the research experience.
On 200 questions from the private validation set of Vals AI's Legal Research Bench, OpenAI reported the configuration passed the overall correctness check on 54.0% of questions versus 38.7% for GPT‑6 Astra with web search alone at the highest reasoning effort — a 40% relative improvement. On case-law questions it found 24% more reference cases and retrieved up to 54% more relevant passages from the correct opinions. The figures come from OpenAI's launch post.
Access is initially limited to selected firms through a Trusted Access Program in ChatGPT and Codex, with API availability "coming soon" as gpt-6-astra-law. Eligible firms get Zero Data Retention on the API, and ChatGPT Enterprise usage is excluded from human review by default; OpenAI is working with Latham & Watkins on permissions, ethical walls and firm oversight. API customers Harvey and Legora will build on it, and 26 new ecosystem plugins connect ChatGPT to tools including Relativity and Clio. Sullivan & Cromwell, Ropes & Gray and Cooley have built internal tools with OpenAI's forward-deployed engineers.
OpenAI did not disclose pricing, eligibility criteria, or a general availability date.