【AI前沿】The AI legal services industry is heating up — Anthropic is getting in on the action

Anthropic announced Tuesday that it is launching a host of new chatbot features designed to provide automated assistance to law firms. The new features expand Claude for Legal — the law-focused plug-in thatlaunched earlier this year— offering users a new set of legal plug-ins and MCP connectors designed for specific areas of law.The new tools come amid hot competition in the legal AI space. In March, the AI law startup Harvey, which uses agentic AI to automate legal workflows,raised $200 millionat a valuation of $11 billion. Last month, a rival startup, Legora,raised a $600 millionSeries D and launcheda high-profile ad campaignfeaturing Jude Law. Legora offers similar services to Harvey — automated solutions built to simplify the often byzantine law processes that have traditionally involved entire teams of humans.Anthropic’s new tools are designed to help law firms automate specific clerical functions — things like document search and review, case law resources, deposition prep, document drafting, and other related areas. The plug-ins — which represent a bundle of functions and automated tools — are designed to work across legal fields like commercial, privacy, corporate, employment, product, and AI governance, Anthropic says.Anthropic is also offering a number of model context protocol connectors. MCPs connect specific data sources and third-party systems to AI models, allowing the models to interact with them directly. In this case, the new MCP connectors integrate Claude into a variety of software applications that are already routinely used by law firms — applications for document management like Docusign and file search platforms like Box. Legal research sites like Thomson Reuters (which operates Westlaw) can also be connected.The new connectors and plug-ins are being made available to all paying Claude customers, the company said. The new features also build upon other plug-ins designed for the legal industrythat the company launchedin February.“The legal sector is facing mounting pressure to adopt AI, and the firms and in-house teams that move are pulling ahead fast,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Claude is making a deeper push into knowledge work, with the legal sector emerging as one of its most significant and fastest-growing industries.”As AI companies have sought to court law firms, AI-related failures have caused real problems in court. Dozens of lawyershave been caughtusing AI to generate error-ridden legal documents, as has at least onemajor law firm. Last year, Californiaissued a first-of-its-kind fineagainst an attorney who had used ChatGPT to draft an appeal riddled with fake quotes. Federal judgeshave also been caughtusing it to draft rulings, a trend thatdrew the scrutinyof congressional leaders last year. Meanwhile,AI-generated lawsuitsare said to be clogging the arteries of justice — overwhelming courts with stacks of bizarrely argued legal “slop.”TopicsAI,Anthropic,Claude,Harvey,legoraWhen you purchase through links in our articles,we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.Lucas RopekSenior Writer, TechCrunchLucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo.

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