Good morning. Early this year, it became clear to investors that companies with a focus on the legal profession were highly vulnerable to an incursion by frontier AI developers. Harvey, an AI platform for legal work, has continued to show resilience since then, and it's worth understanding how that's so.

The four-year-old startup has fused deep domain expertise with its constantly evolving AI platform. I'm sure it's difficult to maintain a constant mastery on both fronts. But companies that can make it work are in better position to build a good future.

Harvey yesterday unveiled a major update, Harvey II, that incorporates memory into the platform. While leading generalist AI platforms have been incorporating memory in a big way since 2024, this is newer territory for AI in specialized professional markets.

"Harvey II is all about moving from AI that responds to individual prompts towards Harvey that increasingly understands how you work in the context of the work that you're doing," Harvey Chief Product Officer Anique Drumright told me. "No lawyer starts from zero context or zero understanding of the client or zero preferences. So how do we build a product that more reflects how lawyers actually work?" (Read the full column here.)

Harvey has been building memory since January, but engineering is only one dimension of the effort. "We built Harvey II closely alongside our customers," co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg said on LinkedIn. "I'm grateful to every firm and legal team that helped shape the product."

Weinberg didn't set out to be a technology entrepreneur. He studied liberal arts at Kenyon College [full disclosure: I did too, once upon a time] and law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Weinberg began his career as an associate at O'Melveny & Myers, specializing in securities and antitrust litigation.

Weinberg told me earlier this year that his experience as a junior lawyer was invaluable when he shifted course and launched Harvey. A senior role in the legal profession, he said, might have blinded him to the everyday friction of legal workflows. Being a junior associate allowed him to understand where the industry's data lives, what practitioners actually care about and where inefficiencies exist.

Such proximity to the market is the foundation for companies that distinguish themselves from increasingly powerful general AI. The experience of frustration distinguishes humans from machines, at least for now. It isn't fun, but in the right hands, it's an invaluable part of the creative process.

Epic token consumption. Between January and June of this year, monthly token consumption on the Harvey platform grew 14-fold, to 14.5 trillion tokens a month from 1 trillion, co-founder and President Gabriel Pereyra told me. That level of demand goes a long way toward explaining why so much capital continues to pour into the construction of AI infrastructure, which is necessary to produce those tokens.

One more round. In March, Harvey raised $200 million at a valuation of $11 billion, in a round led by Sequoia Capital and GIC. The company, which has annual recurring revenue of about $350 million, is now looking to raise $500 million at a valuation of $15.5 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Does your company shape AI around domain expertise? Send your feedback to me at steven.rosenbush@wsj.com (if you're reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply).

On Our Radar

OpenAI showed tepid second-quarter growth compared with Anthropic, The Wall Street Journal reports. It told investors its revenue grew by 18% from the first to the second quarter, while its losses deepened, pushing the company further away from profitability ahead of a much-anticipated initial public offering, people familiar with the matter said. The results disappointed some investors who had hoped the startup would show more progress catching up to Anthropic, whose revenue more than doubled in the same period.

One demographic where OpenAI is doubling down? Teenagers. Tuesday the company rolled out "ChatGPT for Teens," with stronger safety guardrails and a homework-helper "study mode." The creation of a teen experience comes as Meta Platforms is being accused in court of contributing to the youth mental health crisis, and some elements of ChatGPT for Teens appear to be borrowed from Meta's playbook, The Wall Street Journal reports.

IBM said it cleared another hardware hurdle on its path to building a quantum supercomputer, Barron's reports. The company said the advancement, which involves integrating and cooling different modules together, lays the groundwork for scaling the ultracold environment needed to link hundreds of quantum chips, and will help IBM launch its fault-tolerant Starling quantum supercomputer before the end of the decade.

Shares of Unitree Robotics, the first humanoid robot firm to list in mainland China, soared over 600% after the company's trading debut on Tuesday, MarketWatch reports. JPMorgan estimates that global shipments of humanoid robots will rise from 18,000 units last year to 60,000 in 2026 and 1.75 million by 2030, with China expected to take up more than half of the market share.

Startup Network Bio, which helps medical researchers virtually access tissue and blood samples from major academic hospitals, said it has raised $50 million in financing from S32, Breyer Capital and others, WSJ Pro reports. The firm said that helping researchers access more data will allow them to better leverage AI in their medical research.

Tech companies are offering community investments, job guarantees and open houses to counter a growing public backlash against AI data centers, WSJ reports. A Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans oppose local data center construction. The first quarter of 2026 saw record project delays for a single quarter.

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About Us

Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute's new Executive Resilience series, where she's profiling America's top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

Follow Belle Lin on LinkedIn and X for her latest reporting on enterprise technology and AI.

Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Tom Loftus is the editor of The Morning Download. He suggests following Isabelle, Belle and Steve on their various social channels. But if you insist, here's his LinkedIn.