Ivo has launched a super-affordable ‘open-source model for contract work’. Branded as Sage, it was built in partnership with River AI by post-training DeepSeek V4 Flash on long-horizon contract work. It used both public and synthetic data generated by lawyers, with River providing technical and training infrastructure help.

AL asked ChatGPT to compare costs to major models and it said: ‘DeepSeek V4.1 Flash API pricing is $0.15 per million uncached input tokens. A comparable frontier model can be $2 to $5 per million input tokens, and $12 to $30 per million output tokens. In other words, this is around 20X to 50X cheaper.’

And that matters, especially as lawyers apply AI to more and more documents during their work. (See tables below.)

Ivo, which started in New Zealand, and now also operates from San Francisco, explained that ‘by open-sourcing its [contract AI] model, Ivo is enabling lawyers to fine-tune it on their own datasets, adjust its rules and safeguards for specific use cases, and iterate quickly on new ideas or approaches.’

They added that their approach greatly increased accuracy compared to a general model: ‘After reinforcement learning, the model went from scoring seventy percent of the pass criteria of the Legal Agent Benchmark (LAB) Contracts to ninety-one percent. It reached comparable quality of much larger frontier models and higher token efficiency at a fraction of the cost.’…

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