Harvey builds its flagship legal model on Chinese open weights, not its investor's API

The base weights are the commodity in this arrangement. Anyone can download Kimi K3, released in July by Moonshot ^[2]. What cannot be downloaded is the grading: Harvey paid lawyers, some on staff and some through Mercor and Snorkel, to invent mock disputes and case files and then score how models reasoned through them ^[10]. That corpus exists because someone bought it, and it moves to whatever base looks best next year.

Cofounder Gabe Pereyra's description of the product, routing each task to whichever model suits it, is the doctrine rather than a hedge ^[9]. A system that already treats OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as interchangeable inputs ^[4] has defined its suppliers as swappable, and adding an owned option to that router is a procurement decision more than a research one.

The arithmetic makes the pressure legible. Harvey is valued at $15.5bn ^[7] on more than $350mn annualised ^[15], which puts the price at under roughly 44 times revenue ^[18]. A multiple in that range is a bet on margin expansion, and margin is hard to expand when the largest variable input is metered by firms selling into the same buying committee ^[8].

What the move does not remove is a counterparty. Kimi K3's licence permits derivative models but sends model-as-a-service operators above $20mn of revenue in any 12-month period to negotiate a separate agreement with Moonshot ^[14]. Whether a legal research product counts as model-as-a-service is the load-bearing definition here, and the source material does not settle it. If it does count, the negotiation is not a marginal one.

The regulatory result is stranger than the commercial one. Because a post-train sits well below the roughly one-third-of-original-training-compute marker in the Commission's guidelines, Harvey does not become the provider of the modified model, and most obligations stay upstream ^[12][13]. So Harvey gets the cost profile of ownership without the paperwork of authorship, and a European firm deploying Tenet inherits a documentation chain that begins in Beijing ^[13]. That is a manageable answer in a procurement questionnaire and a less comfortable one when the underlying work is privileged.

Legora, chasing a $10bn valuation and selling to many of the same firms ^[11], now has to answer the same question from the other side. In a market where Chinese weights are already free ^[16], the cheapest engine and the most awkward provenance are currently the same object.