{"id":271373,"date":"2026-02-06T22:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T22:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/271373\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T22:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T22:52:08","slug":"maybe-ai-agents-can-be-lawyers-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/271373\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe AI agents can be lawyers after all"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, I wrote about Mercor\u2019s new benchmark<\/a> measuring AI agents\u2019 capabilities on professional tasks like law and corporate analysis. At the time, the scores were pretty dismal, with every major lab scoring under 25%, so we concluded lawyers were safe from AI displacement, at least for now.<\/p>\n

But AI capabilities can change a lot in a couple of weeks.<\/p>\n

This week\u2019s release of Anthropic\u2019s Opus 4.6<\/a> shook up the leaderboards<\/a>, with Anthropic\u2019s new model scoring just shy of 30% in one-shot trials, and an average of 45% when given a few more cracks at the problem. Notably, the release included a bunch of new agentic features, including \u201cagent swarms,\u201d which may have helped with this kind of multistep problem-solving.<\/p>\n

Regardless, the score is a huge jump from the previous state-of-the-art, and a sign that progress on foundation models isn\u2019t slowing down. Mercor CEO Brendan Foody, who was particularly impressed, said, \u201cjumping from 18.4% to 29.8% in a few months is insane.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"The APEX-Agents Leaderboard.Image Credits:Mercor (screenshot)<\/p>\n

Thirty percent is still a long way from 100%, so it\u2019s not like lawyers need to be worried about getting replaced by machines next week. But they should be a lot less confident than they were last month!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, I wrote about Mercor\u2019s new benchmark measuring AI agents\u2019 capabilities on professional tasks like law and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[16709,365,6166,363,364,768,1017,5941,15610,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-271373","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-agentic-ai","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-anthropic","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-benchmarks","14":"tag-exclusive","15":"tag-in-brief","16":"tag-mercor","17":"tag-new-zealand","18":"tag-newzealand","19":"tag-nz","20":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}