Australian-made LLM beats OpenAI and Google at legal retrieval

"Isaacus, an Australian foundational legal AI startup, has launched Kanon 2 Embedder, a state-of-the-art legal embedding LLM, and unveiled the Massive Legal Embedding Benchmark (MLEB), an open-source benchmark for evaluating legal information retrieval performance across six jurisdictions (the US, UK, EU, Australia, Singapore, and Ireland) and five domains (cases, statutes, regulations, contracts, and academia).

Kanon 2 Embedder ranks first on MLEB as of 23 October 2025, delivering 9% higher accuracy than OpenAI Text Embedding 3 Large and 6% higher accuracy than Google Gemini Embedding while running >30% faster than both LLMs. Kanon 2 Embedder leads a field of 20 LLMs, including Qwen3 Embedding 8B, IBM Granite Embedding R2, and Microsoft E5 Large Instruct."