Anthropic has hired Robert Mahari as its first official ‘Head of Claude for Legal’. Mahari is a Fellow of Stanford’s CodeX legal tech group, recently finished a Doctorate in legal AI at MIT, and has his own small legal AI startup, Akiva. He joins Mark Pike, an Associate General Counsel and product lead for ‘Claude for the legal industry’, as part of the team developing Claude for Legal. The move comes as rival OpenAI gets closer to revealing its legal offering following its recent hire of Ironclad founder, Jason Boehmig. The new hire underlines Anthropic’s intention to build out its talent base for Claude for Legal. In a statement on social media, Mahari said he is joining Anthropic to shape how Claude serves law firms, in-house teams, and legal tech companies, from product to GTM. He noted that Mark Pike, Eleanor Dorfman, and their team launched Claude for Legal, and that lawyers are highly engaged users of Claude Cowork, with enterprises seeing immense value from AI-powered use cases across their legal functions. He also stated that Anthropic’s models lead the field on Legora’s recent benchmark for agentic legal reasoning.