OpenAI Launches Astra for Law AI Platform for Legal Work

OpenAI has launched Astra for Law, a specialized version of its GPT6 Astra model designed for legal work, marking the company's latest expansion into professional industry-specific AI tools. The product, introduced on September 17, combines the company's most powerful AI model with a dedicated U.S. legal search index, custom instructions for legal analysis and writing, and integrations with existing law firm software. The platform is initially available to selected law firms through a Trusted Access program, with API access planned for the near future. OpenAI reports that in its own testing, Astra for Law passed 54% of questions on a private validation set from Vals AI's Legal Research Bench, compared to 38.7% for the standard GPT6 Astra model using web search alone. The company claims this represents a 40% relative improvement in accuracy. A core component of the system is a legal search index covering U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across more than 230 million URLs. The index incorporates the CourtListener collection from the Free Law Project, which OpenAI states covers over 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law.