Thomson Reuters Adds to AI Stable With $650M Casetext Deal

Thomson Reuters has acquired artificial intelligence (AI)-powered legal startup Casetext for $650 million.

The Canadian multinational — whose businesses include news organization Reuters and legal research platform Westlaw — announced the deal late Monday (June 26), saying it would add to its existing AI initiatives.

It’s also happening amid a wave of recent acquisitions aiming to capture the rising popularity of generative AI.

“The acquisition of Casetext is another step in our ‘build, partner and buy’ strategy to bring generative AI solutions to our customers,” Thomson Reuters President and CEO Steve Hasker said in a news release. “We believe that Casetext will accelerate and expand our market potential for these offerings — revolutionizing the way professionals work, and the work they do.”

Casetext, founded in 2013, uses AI and machine learning to create technology for legal professionals. According to the release, the company received early access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, which powers CoCounsel, its recently-launched “AI legal assistant.”

The deal — expected to close in the second half of the year — came on the same day as a pair of other AI-related acquisitions.

Monday also saw the news that data management company Databricks was buying generative AI startup MosaicML for $1.3 billion to tap into demand among businesses for their own version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, finance automation platform Ramp acquired AI firm Cohere.io in a deal the company said was designed to bring generative AI to finance and help automate workflows, improve customer experiences, and save businesses time and money.

As this is happening, governments around the world are looking to regulate the technology, with the European Union’s (EU) Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) slated to gradually go into effect starting next year. And as noted here Tuesday (June 27), the EU has so far outpaced the U.S. in terms of regulations.

“It’s an interesting Rorschach to figure out, you know, what is important to the EU versus what is important to the United States,” Shaunt Sarkissian, founder and CEO at AI-ID, said in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

“If you look at all rules that come out of the EU, generally they tend to be very consumer privacy-oriented and less fixated on how this is going to be used in commerce,” he added.

Considering that AI needs to be trained on data, the EU’s AIA could have the unintended effect of moving future innovations to other parts of the world.

“If you make it difficult for models to be trained in the EU versus the U.S., well, where will the technology gravitate? Where it can grow the best — just like water, it will flow to wherever is most easily accessible,” Sarkissian said.