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Simon Willison

What Simon Willison thinks about OpenAI

@simon-willison · 57 positions · On ppll ↗

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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Only Simon Willison on OpenAI. See everyone on OpenAI

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

  1. Our readingAnthropic's new credit scheme goes some way to overcoming the difference with OpenAI's Codex subscription deal.

    Anthropic

    Their wordsThis new credit scheme goes at least some way to overcoming that difference.

    ↗Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5simonwillison.net

  2. 4 weeks earlier

  3. Our readingIf OpenAI really never told RubyGems of its agents' attack, either it failed to find it in its logs after later incidents or chose silence, and both are bad.

    HuggingFace

    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

  5. Our readingNot showing the code and exact details of what the agent ran in the ChatGPT UI is a lack of transparency and an anti-feature.

    design

    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

  6. 8 days earlier

  7. 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

  8. 4 weeks earlier

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

    Anthropic

    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

  10. 5 months earlier

  11. 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.

    Anthropic

    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