On Tuesday, Thomson Reuters announced it has acquired UK-based startup Safe Sign Technologies “to accelerate its AI strategy,” according to a press release. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Safe Sign, which focuses on developing legal-specific large language models (LLMs), was co-founded in February 2022 by Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, a current trainee solicitor at A&O Shearman, and Dr. Jonathan R. Schwartz, a Cambridge Law AI professor and researcher, who is also the company’s chief scientist. Following the acquisition, the Safe Sign team will report directly to Thomson Reuters Chief Technology Officer Joel Hron and will be working closely with the Thomson Reuters Labs team, the release states. “Safe Sign’s world-leading team—drawn from Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard and MIT—is pleased to join with Thomson Reuters to become a major scientific and industrial disrupter in legal AI,” Kardos-Nyheim and Schwarz said in a joint statement in the release.