Devtools must be open source (exe.dev)
My comment on Devtools must be open source (exe.dev) — Hacker News.One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works
Knowledge catalogue
My comment on Devtools must be open source (exe.dev) — Hacker News.One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works
Don't be a meat proxy Niklas Gruhn coins an excellent new term - meat proxy - for people who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers. By all means, prompt AI. But don't just rel
Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the
Simon Willison noted that Qwen 3.8 Max and MiniMax‑H3 were released within hours of each other. The MiniMax team announced that MiniMax‑H3 is now publicly available on Hugging Face (https://huggingfac
The June edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: Accidental cyberattacks by OpenAl and Anthr
Open letters about AI development I wrote this summary of the past few weeks of open letters as a section of my sponsors-only newsletter but I've decided to share it here as well. Open Weights and Ame
Release: datasette-apps 0.2a0 Changes that improve Datasette Apps when created and edited using Datasette Agent: New app_debug() tool allowing agent to open an app (invisibly) and test it using JavaSc
at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack. people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same
Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science A few days ago it was Anthropic discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude using Mythos Preview, spending 100,000 on tokens and with
Release: datasette-agent 0.4a0 New await context.browser_task() mechanism allowing agent tools to run code directly in the user's browser. #33 This is an exciting new capability: it makes it easy for
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 The latest release in DeepSeek's V4 family, 'with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities'. It's 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears
Simon Willison switched his Datasette Agent instance from Gemini 3.1 Flash‑Lite to GPT‑5.6 “Luna” after a recent 80% price drop. He reports the new model is significantly faster and automatically gene
OK, GPT-5.6 Luna is a bit of a beast. Given the 80% price drop today I decided to try it in Datasette Agent, and it's furiously quick and generates all the SQL, HTML and JavaScript (for Datasette Apps
Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison On Monday Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal invited me to join their podcast to talk about the wild week we've had - with Kimi K3 show
smevals - a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses I've been working with Jesse Vincent's Prime Radiant applied AI research lab building out this evals framework to help answer
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to th
Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6 Huge price drop from OpenAI today: GPT-5.6 Terra got a 20% reduction, and GPT-5.6 Luna got a massive 80% drop. OpenAI credit 5.6 Sol with enabling
GPT-5.6 found optimizations that 'reduced end-to-end serving costs by 20%' for OpenAI to serve that model Presumably that's billions of dollars a month in savings at this point? Codex analysed product
Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations It happened again! This is turning into something of a pattern. Last week OpenAI accidentally exploited Hugging Face when one
Simon Willison notes that both Anthropic and OpenAI build products that rely heavily on searching data but keep the underlying search index they use hidden from public view. He finds it surprising how
Release: llm 0.32rc1 This RC for LLM 0.32 finishes the work that started in LLM 0.32a0 - it adds a new schema design that does a much better job of capturing the details of the prompts and responses r
Release: llm 0.32rc2 Hot on the heels of RC1, this fixes a dependency issue and also adds two neat new features: The default model for users who have not set their own default is now GPT-5.6 Luna. It
Release: llm-chat-completions-server 0.1a0 A key goal of the new content-addressable logs in LLM 0.32rc1 was being able to support OpenAI Chat Completion style requests where each incoming message ext
OpenAI has collaborated with Microsoft’s Bing while also running its own web‑crawling and indexing systems, and Anthropic similarly relies on search‑derived data. Both firms prominently incorporate se
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing,
This is absolutely wild... Anthropic reviewed their logs and found out that their own supposedly-sandboxed cyber evals had hacked three separate companies back in April without them noticing! In a rev
A new TIL on adding custom MCP servers to both the ChatGPT and Claude regular chat interfaces - it's a little less obvious than I had hoped, but I got there in the end https://til.simonwillison.net/ll
TIL: Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT Connecting a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT's standard chat interfaces is possible, but can take quite a few steps. Tags: ai, generative-
AI Worming through Word Neat new prompt injection variant by Håkon Måløy, who found a way to upgrade prompt injection attacks against Microsoft Word to full self-replicating worms: An attacker places
Right now we’re in the midst of a historic transition from traditional public-key algorithms based on EC-based cryptography and RSA, moving over to new post-quantum algorithms based on novel problems.
Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident Hugging Face just released this extremely detailed technical description of OpenAI's recent accidental cyberat
Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude The best part of this article (here's the repo) about how Anthropic researchers used Claude Mythos to find mathematical flaws in both HAWK and a weaker
Happy Stateless MCP day! I just got taught that you can use Cloudflare's AI Playground: https://playground.ai.cloudflare.com/ to play with MCP servers like: https://keyboardia.dev/mcp or: https://agen
I really hope we get details from @OpenAI on the task that as specifies to their rogue agent I'm guessing it was given the full ExploitGym suite and told to solve it, with an option to run 5.6-Sol sub
@mitsuhiko Turns out the 'third-party provider' with the sandbox that was used for the attack was Modal, though they blame one of their customers for deploying an endpoint without authentication: http
We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution. This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform
This is detailed, fascinating and answers all sorts of open questions I'd love to know more about the 'unsecured public code-evaluation sandbox hosted on a third-party provider's infrastructure' that
An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time. A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with
moonshotai/Kimi-K3 As promised earlier this month, Moonshot have released the weights for their excellent 2.8 trillion parameter Kimi K3. They're a hefty 1.56TB on Hugging Face. Kimi introduced their
An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud Fascinating investigation by Matt Lenhard into the market that has grown up around reselling LLM tokens at a discount by pooling A
More than any of these eval scores, what is most exciting to me is something else: Opus 5 is our least prompt injectable model yet. It is a bit buried in the system card, but across PI evals and red t
Ruff v0.16.0 Astral shipped a significant new version of their Ruff Python linting tool a few days ago on July 23rd. I noticed today because my various CI jobs all started failing thanks to new defaul
Introducing Claude Opus 5 I've been offline kayaking with sea otters for much of today so I haven't had a chance to put Anthropic's new model Claude Opus 5 through its paces yet. The buzz is positive,
ChatGPT Sites means ChatGPT in 'Work' mode can build and deploy public websites running on Cloudflare Workers, including with persistence on top of SQLite (OpenAI do not make it easy to figure out tha
The first known runaway AI agent - or a very bad marketing stunt? Martin Alderson's commentary on the OpenAI accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face includes a couple of details I hadn't considere
Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing? Excellent piece of work by Dylan Castillo, who took a deep-dive into the frequently pondered question of whether the AI labs have been deliberately training models to draw
I wrote about the completely wild incident where OpenAI were testing a new model and it broke out of its sandbox and broke INTO Hugging Face to steal the answers to the benchmark https://simonwillison
This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model's guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the model broke
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising
Tucked away in this article is an appeal to the AI skeptics to PLEASE stop writing off stories like this OpenAI accidental exploit of Hugging Face as a dishonest marketing trick Frontier models can fi
Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World's Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic's Claude Code team. We talked about Claude Code, Claude Tag, Fable, c
Nativ: Run AI models locally on your Mac Prince Canuma is the developer behind the excellent MLX-VLM Python library for running vision-LLMs using MLX on a Mac. I'm really excited about his new project
We talked about Claude Code, Claude Tag, Fable, coding agent security, evals, tool design, and how Anthropic use these tools themselves Claude Tag (Claude Code via Slack) is already landing 65% of the
I keep hearing anecdotes from people who used coding agents to reverse-engineer and automate devices in their homes. I think this is an interesting illustration of the impact of the reduced cost of wr
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Interesting proposal from Ben Thompson that both addresses the hypocrisy of labs outlawing distillation against their models despite training on unlicensed data, and co
Tool: Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid) While exploring the codebase for the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent I came across xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs, a 'self-contained terminal
How I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets I've been impressed by the way the Claude web_fetch tool is designed to avoid data exfiltration attacks. Ayush Paul found a hole in that
xai-org/grok-build, now open source xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to
The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and w
simonw/pedalican Clearly I wasn't paying attention when these were first announced back in May, but today I accidentally activated a 'pet' in Codex Desktop - a little animated robot, reminiscent of Cl