korrents
Simon Willison

What Simon Willison thinks about OpenAI

@simon-willison · 29 positions · 0 changes of mind

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

Everything they publish, on ppll ↗

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.

4 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Simon Willison has said — not written or endorsed by them.

4 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

  1. Our readingWeb applications are generally expected to treat GET requests as safe and not use them to change server-side data, though not all software follows that convention.

    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

    Interesting
  2. 1 day earlier

  3. Our readingLong-context processing is close to being a solved problem for frontier AI models.

    Their wordsOpenAI may have vanquished one of the ongoing challenges with long context processing.

    ↗GPT‑6 Astrasimonwillison.net

    Interesting
  4. 3 weeks earlier

  5. Our readingClaude Haiku hallucinates badly enough that its use inside Claude Code's WebFetch tool is a hallucination risk on every fetched URL.

    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!

    ↗@simonw on Xx.com

    Anthropic

    Interesting
  6. 5 months earlier

  7. Our readingThe frontier labs optimise their models for code above everything else because coding is where the money is: developers will pay $200 a month once a model is good enough.

    Their wordsOpenAI and Anthropic have both realized that code is the most important thing to optimize the models for, cuz that's where the money is. Like coders will spend $200 a month on a plan if it's good enough, it turns out.

    ↗Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summityoutube.com 13th of 18 in this recording

    Anthropic

    Interesting