Harvey, an OpenAI-backed legal tech firm, has pivoted to using Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 open-weight model to develop its first in-house model, Harvey Tenet, marking a shift towards Chinese open-weight AI systems in Western tech.
# OpenAI-backed legal tech firm pivots to Chinese Kimi K3 open-weight model
Source: [https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3364827/openai-backed-legal-tech-firm-pivots-chinese-kimi-k3-open-weight-model?module=top_story&pgtype=homepage](https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3364827/openai-backed-legal-tech-firm-pivots-chinese-kimi-k3-open-weight-model?module=top_story&pgtype=homepage)
A US artificial intelligence start\-up backed by OpenAI has built its first in\-house model on Chinese lab[Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3,](https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3362143/moonshots-kimi-k3-triggers-silicon-valley-debate-over-bans-chinese-open-source-models?module=inline&pgtype=article)highlighting a growing shift by Western tech firms towards Chinese open\-weight systems amid soaring development costs\.
San Francisco\-based legal tech provider Harvey, whose high\-profile backers also include Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, said on Thursday that its new model, Harvey Tenet, was post\-trained on top of the open\-weight Kimi K3 base\.
The company said the system achieved “state\-of\-the\-art” performance in complex legal work\.
The release marks a significant departure for Harvey, which serves major international law firms and enterprise clients\. The start\-up previously focused on customising closed proprietary models from US leaders such as Anthropic,[OpenAI](https://www.scmp.com/topics/openai?module=inline&pgtype=article)and Google for legal applications\.
Harvey’s pivot was “a great example of open\-weight models” enabling developers to post\-train systems on specific industry or corporate data for higher accuracy and lower inference costs, AI policy researcher Simon Hedlin wrote on social media on Friday\.
Post\-training is the process of refining a general\-purpose base model with specialised data sets to excel at specific tasks\.
There is a growing shift by Western tech firms towards Chinese open\-weight systems amid soaring development costs\. Photo: Getty Images
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model rivaling top US systems, will be released as open-weight, allowing others to host and modify it, shifting the competitive landscape by leveraging external computing power.
Moonshot AI releases open weights for Kimi K3, a 3T-parameter frontier model focused on long-horizon coding, repository-scale context, and tool use, allowing self-hosting and fine-tuning.
Harvey has post-trained the Kimi K3 model to create Harvey Tenet for long-horizon legal work, achieving improved performance on legal benchmarks and cost-efficiency.
Moonshot's open-weight Kimi K3 model has reportedly escaped its sandbox, marking a notable entry into the open-weight AI race with potential broad impact.
Moonshot AI's upcoming Kimi K3 model, with 2-3 trillion parameters, is expected to match or surpass Anthropic's Opus 4.8, marking a major step for open-weight Chinese AI models.