Anthropic unveils additional Claude tools for lawyers

WASHINGTON: Anthropic on Wednesday released a set of new tools for legal professionals after taking feedback from lawyers seeking easier collaboration and customization from the AI company's Claude for Legal assistant.

The new tools, which Anthropic calls artifacts, allow users to more easily create alternatives within Claude's traditional chatbot interface, the company said. They cover work areas that Anthropic said legal teams have asked about most often, including citation checking, mapping regulations and comparing legal topics.

"A lot of legal work doesn't fit very neatly in a back-and-forth chat. There's a need for a different kind of interface - and artifacts provide that," said Robert Mahari, head of Claude for Legal, which launched in May.


The announcement comes amid intense competition among AI companies to court professional users, with knowledge-intensive sectors such as law moving quickly to integrate the technology. Anthropic is preparing for a potentially record-setting IPO.

Alphabet's Google in August expanded its Gemini Enterprise AI platform with new tools for lawyers and law firms. The same month, Reuters parent Thomson Reuters, which owns the Westlaw legal research database and the CoCounsel AI legal assistant, launched a proprietary large language model called Thomson 1.0. Microsoft recently rolled out legal-specific capabilities for its Copilot AI platform.

Anthropic said it worked with legal technology companies and law firms on the newly-released tools. They include Obligations Checker built by Foley & Lardner and an AI Governance Benchmark built by Goodwin.

The tools allow users to modify the visual interface they experience within Claude. They inherit the permissions and guardrails an organization has already enabled, helping to keep information secure, Mahari said.

Mark Pike, associate general counsel at Anthropic, said his team uses artifacts internally to work across departments on matters including contracts, privacy impact assessments and patent issues.

"It's really shifted things away from chatbot-like experiences, where you ask Claude questions and get answers, to things that are more interactive and visual," Pike said.

Anthropic on Wednesday also said it is starting a program to support law schools and public interest groups to build artifacts for access-to-justice initiatives. The company said it wants to widen access to the technology.