Dateline: October 2, 2026 — San Francisco
Ivo released Sage, an open-source AI model post-trained specifically for long-horizon contract review, at its first user conference, Ivo Inscribe, on October 1. Why it matters: legal AI has been almost entirely closed-source until now — Sage is the first model that attorneys, researchers, and developers can download, run, and build on for free.
What happened
Ivo, the AI-native contract intelligence platform founded in New Zealand and headquartered in San Francisco, announced Sage at Inscribe, its first customer event for in-house legal and contracting teams. The company calls it the first legal AI company open-source release — unlike competing legal AI products, Sage can be downloaded, fine-tuned on a firm’s own data, and adapted with custom rules and safeguards.
How Sage was built — and how it scores
Sage was built in partnership with River AI by post-training DeepSeek V4 Flash on long-horizon contract work, using public plus synthetic data generated by real attorneys, with River providing training infrastructure. After reinforcement learning, the model jumped from meeting 70% to 91% of the pass criteria on the Legal Agent Benchmark (LAB) Contracts. According to Ivo, it now reaches comparable quality to much larger frontier models with higher token efficiency at a fraction of the cost.
A new benchmark that tests judgment, not just edits
Alongside the model, Ivo previewed the Ivo-micro1 Contract Bench, built with data lab micro1. Existing legal benchmarks grade only the edits a model makes; this one scores the judgment before the edit — which issues to prioritize, when to show restraint, when to escalate to a human attorney, how to adapt to the specific deal, and whether it follows the playbook. Early findings are blunt: models concede easily and push back poorly (right 82% of the time when accepting a counterparty change, but only 46% when they should counter or reject), and they meet just 23% of escalation criteria — they tend to make calls themselves instead of asking. A public results set is due in the coming weeks.
Also announced: Ivo Collaborate
Ivo also announced general availability of Ivo Collaborate, an end-to-end contract intelligence platform that reads incoming contracts, routes routine agreements by legal’s rules, flags issues needing human judgment, and lets teams search signed agreements for what the business has promised and is owed.
Why it matters
Contract review is one of the most expensive, repetitive uses of legal talent — and until now, the models doing it were black boxes you rented. An open model purpose-built for contracts changes the calculus for in-house teams: firms can fine-tune Sage on their own playbooks, audit its behavior, and run it in-house rather than sending sensitive agreements to a vendor’s API. The benchmark findings are the real story for practitioners — the industry has been grading AI contract tools on redlines while the failure modes are all in judgment: knowing when to fight, when to fold, and when to ask a lawyer. Tested Intelligence take: if you evaluate legal AI tools, add “escalation judgment” and “pushback quality” to your vendor scorecards now — the vendors that win will be the ones that can show you these numbers, not just edit accuracy.
FAQ
Is Ivo Sage really free to use?
Yes — per the announcement, attorneys, researchers, and developers can download, run, and build on it for free, including fine-tuning it on their own datasets and adjusting its rules and safeguards.
What is Sage based on?
It’s a post-training of DeepSeek V4 Flash, built with River AI, using public and attorney-generated synthetic contract data plus reinforcement learning.
How good is it?
Ivo reports 91% of LAB Contracts pass criteria, up from 70% pre-training, with quality comparable to much larger frontier models at higher token efficiency. Independent verification will matter — watch for the public Contract Bench results.
What’s the Ivo-micro1 Contract Bench?
A new contract-review benchmark, previewed at Inscribe, that grades judgment and escalation reasoning across five dimensions of what good attorneys do — not just the edits a model makes.
Sources: Ivo press release via GlobeNewswire