Why it matters
If you build tools for lawyers, you can now price your product: gpt-6-astra-law costs USD 10 per million tokens in and USD 50 out, the same as GPT-6 Astra. You pay nothing extra for the legal search and the legal instructions.
My read: the price list is the real news here, because lawyers just became a product line.
What Astra for Law is
What Astra for Law is
Astra for Law is not a new model. It is GPT-6 Astra with settings, tools and context tailored for professional legal work. OpenAI introduced it on 17 September 2026. In the API it is called gpt-6-astra-law; in the ChatGPT model picker it appears as GPT-6 Astra Law.
Two things are added on top of the model:
- A legal search index. It searches U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules and administrative decisions across more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. The case-law part comes from Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener.
- Custom instructions for legal analysis and writing. They guide the model in applying the research to the client's facts, developing arguments or deal terms, and naming weaknesses and uncertainty.
- For eligible law firms in OpenAI's Trusted Access program: Zero Data Retention on the API, and ChatGPT Enterprise use excluded from human review by default.
What OpenAI's own test shows
What OpenAI's own test shows
OpenAI tested the full setup on 200 U.S. legal research questions from the private validation set of Vals AI's Legal Research Bench. At the highest reasoning effort, Astra for Law passed the overall correctness check on 54.0 percent of the questions. GPT-6 Astra with web search alone passed 38.7 percent.
On case-law questions it found 24 percent more reference cases than GPT-6 Astra with web search alone. These are OpenAI's numbers from its own announcement; I have not seen an independent run yet. And 54 percent also means almost half the answers did not pass.
Sources: OpenAI: Introducing Astra for Law and Vals AI
What it costs
What it costs
The legal configuration costs cent for cent what GPT-6 Astra costs. OpenAI's pricing page calls it promotional pricing, available at least through 31 December 2026. What it costs after that, the page does not say.
A rough example, my own arithmetic: a 40-page contract is about 30,000 tokens. Reading it once costs about USD 0.30, and a 2,000-token review memo about USD 0.10. Ask a second question on the same contract and the cached part costs a tenth. Reasoning at high effort is billed as output, so a real run can cost more.
| Model | Input | Cached input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| gpt-6-astra-law | USD 10.00 | USD 1.00 | USD 50.00 |
| GPT-6 Astra | USD 10.00 | USD 1.00 | USD 50.00 |
Per million tokens, standard rates for context under 272K tokens.
Sources: OpenAI API pricing (developer docs) and OpenAI API pricing
Who it is for
Who it is for, and what we don't know yet
OpenAI aims it at law firms and legal technology companies that build their own products and workflows. It names Harvey and Legora as API customers who will build on it.
Some firms already built tools with OpenAI's engineers: Sullivan and Cromwell an agreement analyzer that brings the firm's negotiating playbooks into new deals, Ropes and Gray a deal diligence system for data rooms, and Cooley a tool for companies preparing to go public.
What nobody outside OpenAI can tell you yet:
- The price after 31 December 2026.
- How it does outside U.S. law. The search index OpenAI describes covers U.S. sources.
- How it handles real contracts. I haven't built anything on it yet, so I can't tell you.
How it got here
How it got here
- 17 September 2026 OpenAI introduces Astra for Law, first for selected law firms through Trusted Access in ChatGPT and Codex, with the API coming soon.
- 31 October 2026 TestingCatalog spots gpt-6-astra-law on the API pricing page, filed as a Legal model configuration.
Sources: OpenAI: Introducing Astra for Law and TestingCatalog on X
Yes, that's my AI avatar in the video. Same opinions, better lighting.