SteuerLLM: An Open-Source AI Model for German Tax Law

Researchers released SteuerLLM, an open-source 28-billion-parameter AI model trained specifically on German tax law, demonstrating that domain-specific design outperforms larger general-purpose models on specialized legal reasoning tasks. The model is smaller, more resource-efficient, and openly published—contrasting with commercial closed-source legal AI platforms like Harvey and Legora. If you're building legal AI, smaller domain-trained models now beat larger generalist ones on real tasks—and SteuerLLM proves it runs on less compute for less money. That changes who can afford to compete with Harvey and who their customers will defect to.