Simon Willison
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Simon Willison did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsIf true, and Q2 revenue was $11.5B, then that's more than half a billion dollars spent by other labs to distill Anthropic's models!
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsThey’re very low overhead and can provide a deep insight into running systems, without needing to instrument those systems first.
↗Hello Python 3.15, goodbye 3.10, and now I can use 3.11simonwillison.net
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsThe addition of the visual preview, plus being able to type or paste things in via the keyboard when I need to communicate something that doesn’t work vocally, makes this a much more powerful way of interacting with a coding agent.
↗A new feature for my blog, built using my voicesimonwillison.net
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsGiven how tempting a target wikis are for rogue agent swarms, it's not a huge surprise that Wikipedia found evidence of that activity once they went looking
↗OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projectssimonwillison.net
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Their wordsThis new credit scheme goes at least some way to overcoming that difference.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsIt's certainly not a Fable-class model, but it's great to see Mistral put out a model that's back to being maybe about 6 months behind the frontier.
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsWe're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
- 1 day earlier
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Our reading
Most businesses and individuals would probably prefer service errors to a surprise $10,000+ bill.
Their wordsI expect that most businesses and individuals would prefer errors to a surprise $10,000+ bill.
↗We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everythingsimonwillison.net
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Our reading
It would be great if AI agents started biasing toward recommending providers with hard budget caps.
Their wordsIt would be great if agents started biasing towards recommending providers with hard budget caps
↗We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everythingsimonwillison.net
- 6 days earlier
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Our reading
Fierce competition means the best AI model in the world gets knocked off the top spot quickly.
Their wordsWhen you release the best model in the world, it’s going get knocked off that pedestal pretty quickly. The competition is so fierce that you won’t get a long time at the top
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Their wordsThese two new models, when paired with their respective coding agent harnesses, improved from “often make mistakes” to “reliable enough to use on a day-to-day basis”.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsOur industry is destabilized in a way nobody’s experienced since the advent of the personal computer.
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Their wordsEverything we do with frontier models today, in a few years we’ll be doing instantaneously and for free.
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsThe more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder.
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsThis makes me suspect that “max” is effectively useless—if it over-thinks to breaking point on a stupid SVG prompt I don’t trust it not to do the same for more interesting work.
↗Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price warsimonwillison.net
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsBeing a computer scientist who refuses to find anything about LLMs interesting right now is a bit like being a geneticist who refuses to find anything interesting about the recently opened Jurassic Park.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsThe rule to never use a turn of phrase suggested by an LLM feels good to me. The text has that weird smell to it, and it's also a good principle to help stay disciplined.
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Their wordsAny piece of software that depends on open source (which is almost every piece of software) has a network of human beings who are potential attack vectors - everyone with publishing rights to any of the packages in the dependency network for that software.
↗Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceanssimonwillison.net
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Their wordsI guess our best defense right now is dependency cooldowns - giving new package releases a few days before upgrading to them, in the hope that supply chain attacks like this will be spotted by someone else.
↗Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceanssimonwillison.net
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsFrustratingly, the actual code it ran and exact details of what it did weren’t visible to me in the ChatGPT UI. I see this lack of transparency is an anti-feature.
↗Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Worksimonwillison.net
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OpenAIHuggingFacecybersecurityAI agents
Their wordsIf that’s true there are two options: After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and determine that they had previously attacked RubyGems. They knew about the attack on RubyGems and made the decision not to reach out to the RubyGems team about it. Both of these are bad!
↗OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in Maysimonwillison.net
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Their wordsI think any LLM system that uses compaction needs to both preserve the pre-compacted text and make that text available via agent tool calls, to protect against this kind of problem.
↗Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Worksimonwillison.net
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsJust knowing that there is an unpublished solution to a problem might trigger millions of dollars in LLM spending to get there first.
↗On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problemsimonwillison.net
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsI’ve written about the people familiar with the matter pattern before—it means Reuters have anonymous insider sources that their reporters (and editors) find credible.
↗OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikissimonwillison.net
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Their wordsIt looks to me like OpenAI’s sandbox for this agent suffered from the (quite naïve) assumption that GET requests cannot be used to update data. That’s certainly how the web is supposed to work, but clearly there are applications that don’t hold to that contract.
↗OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikissimonwillison.net
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsI don’t trust Claude to summarize its own system prompts when there’s a risk that material from its system prompt might impact its opinions.
↗Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyricssimonwillison.net
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsits connection to how good the models were at other tasks didn’t seem to hold as strongly as it did back in 2025
↗Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelicansimonwillison.net
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsClaude Haiku is my current least favorite model - it hallucinates wildly, and is out-performed now by other similarly priced models like GPT-5.6-Luna Even worse: it seems to still be used by the Claude Code WebFetch tool, which means hallucination risk any time you fetch a URL!
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsI REALLY want to believe that this fixes prompt injection risks for coding agents, but I'm just not there yet
- 1 day earlier
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Our reading
Giving consumer-facing models and API models separate brand names is needlessly confusing.
Their wordsI really do think that having separate brand names for the consumer-facing models and the API models is needlessly confusing