About

KAOS is the second-generation Kelvin platform.

A Python platform for legal AI, built for AI agents and the engineers who write them. Developed at 273 Ventures.

What KAOS is

KAOS, the Kelvin Agentic Operating System, is an open-source platform for building legal-AI applications whose answers can be checked against the source. It gives engineers and AI agents a shared toolkit for reading documents, retrieving the relevant passages, and producing answers that trace back to a specific page in a specific filing or contract. Every component speaks the Model Context Protocol, the open standard Anthropic introduced in late 2024 for tool-using AI agents, so the same KAOS toolkit is callable from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and any other client that supports the protocol.

Who builds it

KAOS is built at 273 Ventures, an AI-transformation consultancy founded in 2022. 273V advises law firms, legal departments, legal service providers, and legal-tech companies on AI strategy, training, and implementation, and authors the research that informs the work. Team and company detail live at 273ventures.com.

History

The first-generation Kelvin Legal Data OS retired in late 2025. KAOS is the second-generation redesign: open-source, written for AI agents and engineers from the start, and organized around a single structured document format that every component reads and produces. The earlier product was a single hosted application. KAOS is a set of small Python packages a team can install, run on its own machines, and assemble as it needs.

v1 retired Kelvin Legal Data OS sunset Late 2025 v2 redesign 18 packages, MCP-native rebuild 2026 Open source Apache-2.0, all 18 packages public on GitHub Today YOU ARE HERE Past Current Future

License and status

Every package is published under Apache-2.0 — the same permissive open-source license used by Kubernetes and Apache Spark — one public repository per package under github.com/273v. All 18 packages ship Development Status :: 5 — Production/Stable and are versioned 0.1.x — early, but production-classified; some interfaces may still evolve. The dependency tree is license-audited continuously, with zero GPL/AGPL — see security & supply chain.

A note on ALEA Institute

The ALEA Institute is a U.S. tax-exempt nonprofit research organization founded by the same team. ALEA maintains KL3M and other open legal-AI research projects in the public interest. ALEA is a related organization, not a parent. KL3M is an ALEA project and is not part of KAOS; KAOS is maintained by 273 Ventures.