Harvey's founders say OpenAI is 'indirectly' its biggest competitor (www.businessinsider.com)

Harvey’s founders say the company’s biggest threat isn’t another narrow legal startup but OpenAI — the very platform that powers much of Harvey’s tech and an early investor via the OpenAI Startup Fund. Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra argue that even if OpenAI never ships a dedicated legal product, customers will inevitably benchmark Harvey against whatever general-purpose tools OpenAI releases. Harvey has raised over $800M, is valued at about $5B, and recently signed its 50th Am Law 100 client, but it still faces the classic platform-vs.-vertical tension: a model provider can enable and, potentially, eclipse its partners. Technically, Harvey builds domain-specific applications on top of foundation models (including custom-trained variants deployed with OpenAI), focusing on workflow integration, matter awareness, document retrieval, task routing, and strict governance — what the founders call an “operating system for law firms.” The significance for AI/ML is broader: success in vertical markets may hinge less on raw model quality and more on application-layer engineering, data controls, and regulatory reliability (e.g., avoiding hallucinated citations). The situation underscores how model providers’ move into specialized tooling — even via internal tools like OpenAI’s contract-review demos — reshapes competition and forces startups to differentiate through product depth, trust, and workflow automation.