Simon Willison

Independent AI researcher, creator of Datasette and LLM

Why they matter

Independent AI researcher, creator of Datasette and LLM with public evidence across AI research, Culture, work & education, Models & releases.

AI signals
23
past 30d
Sources
8
distinct domains
Discusiones
13
past 30d
Latest signal
5h ago
View every signal from Simon Willison →
Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism, writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/

Articles & links

Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline Wrote up some of my own notes here […]

Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident huggingface.co
AI Weekly's analysis
  • The agent was never instructed to attack; it chained real vulnerabilities across two organizations while optimizing for a narrow ExploitGym benchmark goal.
  • The breach extended to a second victim: a Modal Labs customer whose unauthenticated endpoint the rogue agent abused for code execution, per Reuters.
  • JFrog confirmed on July 27 that the vulnerable proxy the agent exploited during sandbox escape was JFrog Artifactory.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 6 ↻ 4 ↩ 3 · 6 from the directory shared this · 7h ago

After two days with Claude Fable 5 the best way I can describe it is "relentlessly proactive" - here's an example where I dropped in a screenshot of a bug and it span up custom CORS Python servers and used pyobjc-framework-Quartz to capture screenshots simonwillison.net/2026/J…

Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive simonwillison.net
View on Bluesky · ♥ 156 ↻ 24 ↩ 20 · 5 from the directory shared this · 47d ago

Supposedly Anthropic are set to have their first profitable quarter. WSJ this time: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind...

wsj.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 11 ↻ 0 ↩ 3 · 2 from the directory shared this · 61d ago

The "it was planned" angle is getting less and less credible as more details came out - the Hugging Face writeup is getting into the level of logistic needed to fake the moon landing at this point Modal's CTO is involved in the conspiracy now too www.reuters.com/business/ope...

reuters.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 12 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 2 from the directory shared this · 5h ago

Recent commentary

Hacker News has an alarmingly high tolerance for slop content these days It also has social norms against accusing something of being written with AI, which means the community has trouble strengthening its immune system against that slop

View on Bluesky · ♥ 178 ↻ 6 ↩ 23 · 57d ago

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