❯ Bloomberg says Harvey and other startups are shifting toward open-weight or proprietary models to curb AI costs

Supplier shiftBloomberg reports that legal-tech company Harvey and startups including Abridge, Ramp and Rogo are exploring open-weight models or training their own systems to reduce reliance on a small group of frontier labs. Their approaches differ; the report does not say they have all abandoned closed models.

Margin pressureModel calls are both the engine of vertical AI applications and a direct expense that grows with usage. Routing narrower, repeatable tasks to cheaper systems while reserving frontier models for harder work could improve gross margins and response times. The trade-off is more in-house evaluation, hosting and quality control.

Negotiating positionThese businesses sell workflows and domain knowledge, not a place on a general model leaderboard. Frontier suppliers’ pricing power weakens when customers can show that a substantial share of production tasks runs well on alternatives.

▪ SIGNALWhen the workflow rather than an exclusive model is the moat, model spending becomes a more negotiable procurement line.