Harvey, a well-known legal AI tool, has expanded and chose to work with Google and Anthropic in addition to its past affiliation with OpenAI. This exciting new development was communicated via a blog post on Tuesday.

What makes this move interesting is how successful Harvey has been as an early investment of the OpenAI Startup Fund — a fund associated with OpenAI that supports companies developing innovative products using AI technologies, predominantly those of OpenAI. While Harvey reassures it isn't severing ties with OpenAI, the decision to incorporate more models and incorporate diverse clouds represents a game-changing direction and might tilt the scales in favor of OpenAI’s key competitors.

As part of its initial group of firms, the OpenAI Startup Fund made an investment in Harvey in December 2022, marking a significant milestone under OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Harvey, along with Descript, Mem, and Speak, were the pioneer beneficiaries.

Harvey expanded rapidly since then and is currently valued at $3 billion as a startup as of February. This news followed the announcement of a $300 million Series D funding round led by Sequoia, with other heavyweights including Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, and the OpenAI Fund also making notable contributions.

Intriguingly, Google's venture arm, GV, led Harvey's $100 million Series C funding round back in July 2024. While Google's corporate venture business was included to its capitalization table, Harvey did not immediately apply Google's AI methods.

So, what lit the fire under Harvey to reckon with models beyond those from OpenAI? The answer lies in Harvey's internally developed benchmark, aptly named BigLaw. It made it evident that a broad spectrum of base models is progressively excelling at a range of legal tasks, and certain models outperform others in specific areas.

Instead of allocating its resources to train models, Harvey realized it would be more beneficial to embrace high-functioning, reasoning models from different providers such as Google and Anthropic via Amazon's cloud, and refine them for the legal domain.

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Use of diverse models will also prove advantageous as Harvey develops AI agents. As to the blog post, in less than a year, an array of models—including three non-OAI models—have surpassed the first benchmarked Harvey system on the BigLaw Bench.

The benchmarks also indicated that distinct base models are highly competent at specific legal tasks. Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro is distinguished at legal drafting but struggles with pre-trial tasks like developing oral arguments due to an incomplete understanding of complex evidentiary rules.

Harvey has found that OpenAI's o3 is proficient at executing such pre-trial tasks, with Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet not far behind.

Moreover, Harvey plans to associate with the increasing group of organizations providing a public leaderboard showcasing the performance of various model benchmarks. This board will gauge how significant reasoning models fair on legal tasks. The company will share research where top-notch lawyers present intricate insights into model performance that can't be apprehended by single-score benchmarks alone.

Even while Harvey is using competitors' models, it is also increasing the pressure on its investors, such as Google, to continuously verify its efficacy. However, OpenAI shouldn't stress too much. OpenAI continues to be a leading performer in the field despite the increasingly complicated and somewhat political AI norms.

In a calm claim, Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg stated, "We are very fortunate to have OpenAI as an investor in Harvey and a key collaborator in our product." Moreover, he added, “we are thrilled to broaden our options for clients as we persist in meeting the needs of our global customers.”