Former Justice Department Antitrust Division leaders Jonathan Kanter and Doha Mekki are bringing AI into the fight over corporate power. Their startup, FluxCap, sells a legal research and analysis platform designed to help plaintiffs build cases against large companies, beginning with antitrust disputes.
The idea addresses a practical imbalance: smaller teams may have to examine enormous volumes of evidence while facing defendants with extensive legal staffs. FluxCap’s founders see AI as a way to stretch those teams’ capacity, while acknowledging that legal reasoning requires more than finding documents or producing quick answers.
A research tool built for legal arguments
FluxCap combines proprietary technology with existing large language models. Its platform is meant to identify facts and legal frameworks relevant to a case, assess how an argument might hold up, and point out potential weaknesses in lawyers’ reasoning.
It can also search large collections of discovery materials for indications that a company acted in an anticompetitive way. That work can matter in cases where the significance of a document or conversation depends on what happened around it, rather than on a direct statement of intent.
Kanter describes the product as a “force multiplier” for watchdogs. He sees a role for it in helping small teams take on opponents with much larger resources, and says FluxCap is speaking with public and private enforcers. The antitrust boutique firm Kressin Powers is among its first customers.
Why context is hard for software
Finding potentially useful evidence was one of the most difficult parts of building the system, Kanter says. Company executives are unlikely to plainly describe themselves as monopolists. Instead, lawyers may need to interpret what a message or exchange means in its surrounding circumstances.
The source article points to a recorded phone call in the antitrust trial against Live Nation-Ticketmaster. After a customer chose another ticketing platform, the Live Nation CEO reminded him that a new arena in town could affect how many concerts reached his venue. The customer testified that he understood the comment as a “not-so-veiled” threat to withhold event programming unless he also accepted Live Nation’s ticketing service.
That kind of interpretation is difficult for AI because legal disputes do not always yield a single clean answer. FluxCap’s former government lawyers spent months testing the system on existing and hypothetical cases. Kanter says legal work involves arguments that can be persuasive on both sides, with the aim of convincing a court, jury, or regulator to reach a particular outcome.
A response to unequal legal resources
The company’s premise grew out of Kanter’s time leading the Antitrust Division. During the Biden administration, the Justice Department went to trial against Google twice and brought monopolization suits against Apple and Live Nation, among other actions. The division, however, had to pursue those cases with fewer resources than companies able to field large legal teams and review extensive records.
Congress appropriated $245 million for the entire Antitrust Division for fiscal year 2026. The division had more than 400 attorneys across several issue areas. State attorneys general can face an even tighter staffing constraint: Kanter says a large state AG might have 10 people working on a case.
FluxCap’s approach also reflects earlier efforts inside the division to use technology to manage cases and review evidence. The division secured a $45.5 million grant from the government’s Tech Modernization Fund, but Kanter says his team did not have the opportunity to put it to work before leaving office.
AI can add capacity, but not replace funding
Kanter says the AI legal tools he tried while at the Justice Department could handle some questions but missed nuance in complex antitrust research. FluxCap is meant to address that gap, though its ambitions extend beyond antitrust into other legal practice areas.
He does not present software as a substitute for public investment. Kanter says government still needs more funding, budget, and staff, and that private defendants may continue to have far greater resources than government agencies or private plaintiffs.
FluxCap’s promise, then, is narrower and practical: help a small legal team do more with the time and evidence it has. Whether that capacity changes the balance in high-stakes cases will depend on how well the tool handles the context and competing arguments that make legal work difficult.