Simon Willison · 实时热榜

Release: datasette 1.0a38 This release fixes a SQL injection security issue that affects Datasette instances that serve a mixture of public and private tables in the same database, with access configured using the Datasette permissions system . Site administrators who serve private tables in this way are advised to disable the execute-sql permission ` on that database to prevent users from accessing private tables using raw SQL queries. The bug that has been fixed would have allowed users with a

Moonlight & Mayhem (Raccoon Heist by Codex + GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra) On Wednesday I wrote about One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5 , where I had Claude Fable 5 build a full working game from a premise I generated with GPT-3 and DALL-E four years ago . I decided to pose the exact same prompt to Codex Desktop running GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra - the mode where Sol makes aggressive use of sub-agents - to see how it would do. It produced a much better game! Here's Moonlight & Mayhem - GitHub r

OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about "the Hugging Face Incident" ( previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It's short and information dense and well worth watching, in particular because it provides full details of what happened and how things played out inside OpenAI. I've used the video to construct the timeline below. Here's the timeline. My favourite detail is at the end: OpenAI found out that they were responsible for the a

The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI There's a fun anecdote from Accenture (apparently via leaked meeting audio recordings) in this 404 Media piece from June 24th: “We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It’s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors [...] you were talking about,” Justice Kwak, Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, sa

Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare , per se, but they’re occasional . If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out. I’m aiming for professionalism. I’m performing live in front of an audience — not just jamming in my garage or bedroom, fucking around. So I’m careful and concentrate. I want to hit every note, in time. But at my be

My comment on Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face — Hacker News. I think one of the most interesting details here might be tucked away in that first bulletin point: May 7: OpenAI starts a new training run for an experimental, unreleased model. (Do they mean an evaluation run? They say training run in the video, and later mention a “reward signal to judge how well they’re doing”, so I guess this really was about training a model, not evaluating one that was

Release: datasette 0.65.3 Back-ported the SQL Injection security fix from 1.0a38 . Tags: datasette

Simon Willison on Technical Blogging I was interviewed by Cynthia Dunlop for her "Write that blog!" series back in January, but I just realized I never linked to the interview from my own blog! It includes my answers to the following questions: Why did you start blogging – and why do you continue? What has been the most surprising impact of blogging for you? What blog post are you most proud of and why? What post was the most difficult to write and how did you tackle it? Any lessons learned that

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing Stop me if you've heard this one before : An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. Meta says the breach occurred because of an inadvertent error during testing of the model, similar to previously disclosed incidents with OpenAI and Anthropic. “A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company

Introducing Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2 Yet more evidence that the most important characteristic of any model these days is long-sequence agentic tool calling. Meta shipped their own coding agent as part of getting that to work! Muse Spark 1.2 is a coding-focused update to Muse Spark 1.1, with improvements in code generation, complex debugging, codebase understanding, and end-to-end developer workflows. In Muse Spark 1.2, we significantly scaled up training compute on coding tasks while expandi

Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models And another one . I had to create a accidental-cyberattacks tag to keep track of them all! This post from OpenAI covers both the UK AI Safety Institute attack (see my previous post ) and another attack enabled by Irregular : Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access

Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing It happened again . This time it was the UK government's AI Security Institute who accidentally attacked other companies while running an evaluation with models with the safety filters turned off. From their technical paper (PDF): During a cyber evaluation, from 25 to 28 July 2026, AI agents engaged in sustained, unsanctioned activity directed at what were, in practice, real people and organisations. These attempts were unsuccess

Back in 2022 I tweeted screenshots of a game concept generated by GPT-3 and some concept "art" created using DALL-E. Today, on the fourth anniversary of that tweet, I decided to see if Claude Fable 5 (running in Claude Code for web ) could build the entire game from the content of that tweet. It did a pretty good job of it! You can play the game here . Here's the GitHub repo , and a short video demo: Your browser does not support HTML5 video. How I built this This is the August 5th, 2022 tweet :

I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side provider tools, redesigned content-addressable SQLite logs, new models, and new features enabled by the OpenAI Responses API. I also released a new version of the llm-anthropic plugin with substantial updates of its own. Headline features for LLM CLI users Running LLM against reasoning models now displays the

Release: llm-anthropic 0.26 Includes new features enabled by LLM 0.32 : New models: claude-fable-5 , claude-sonnet-5 , and claude-opus-5 . #75 , #76 Added server-side tools for WebSearch , WebFetch , CodeExecution , and AnthropicMCP , available through LLM's -T interface or Python tools= . The previous -o web_search* options have been removed in favor of -T WebSearch . #79 Upgraded to llm>=0.32 . Reasoning, tool calls, tool results, and server-side tool results now stream as typed events. Reason

PipeNetwork/minimax-h3-mlx MiniMax released MiniMax-H3 two days ago - they describe it as a "a general-purpose, omni-modal generative system", which in practice means it accepts text, images, audio and video and can use them to generate up to 15 second video clips with audio included. This Python package ports it to MLX for running on Apple Silicon. I got it running on my M5 Max MacBook Pro. I cloned the repo and ran the model like this: # First download the models uvx --from huggingface_hub hf

Release: llm 0.32 See my detailed blog post about this release . Tags: llm

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw. — Stev

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 relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add. Via Lobste.rs Tags: definitions , ai , generative-ai , llms , ai-misuse

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 current version. — David Crawshaw's prompt , Devtools must be open source Tags: prompt-engineering , coding-agents , generative-ai , ai , llms , open-source

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. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed that equati

Release: condense-json 1.1 After shipping condense-json 1.0 I started integrating it into LLM, and found there were some desirable new features already: Replacements object can now include values other than strings. These will be identified and used as structural replacements by condense_json() and uncondense_json() . #8 Objects can be used as the basis for merge operations. condense_json() will identify if there are objects that are a close match and will store instructions for keys to update o

Release: condense-json 1.0 I'm trying to get braver at releasing 1.0 versions. This little library is a year and a half old now - I've applied some sensible and non-disruptive fixes and shipped the big 1.0 for it. Here's an example of what it can do, lifted from the README: { "foo" : { "bar" : { "string" : " This is a string with foxes in it " , "nested" : { "more" : [ " Here is a string " , " another with foxes in it too " ] } } } } Combine that with a replacements object: { "1" : " with foxes

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 American AI Leadership was shepherded by Microsoft, dated July 24th, and signed by 235 AI-adjacent companies including NVIDIA (see Jensen's first ever tweet ), Amazon, Y Combinator, The Linux Foundation, and (a later signer) OpenAI. It's clearly an argument designed to counter any instincts by the curr

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 Anthropic models under test GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna Claude Opus 5 Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 Open letters about Al development A fireside chat and a podcast Reigniting my interest in MCP Other model releases My projects What I'm using at the moment Here's a copy of the June newsletter as a

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 work if asked by that coworker. reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping each other, and want AI to give time back — or enhance time together — rather than become a layer separating people. — Greg Brockman , President and Co-Founder, OpenAI Tags: ai-ethics , ai-misuse ,

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 JavaScript. #33 New app_list() tool for listing apps the user has permission to edit, so the agent can edit them. #36 The app_debug() tool is pretty neat: it works by displaying the app in a opacity: 0 iframe with pointer-events: none (so it can't be seen or interacted with) and then executing agent-prov

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 prompts that included "again we are not looking for low hanging fruit, we want proper research to find genuinly hard findings." Now it's OpenAI's turn to flex. They set "an internal version of Astra, our next major model" on finding solutions to ten mathematical problems that "have seen no progress

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 to punch well above its weight. Artificial Analysis rank it ahead of MiniMax M3 - a 428B model. It's $0.14/million input and $0.27/million output pricing means this may currently be the best value-per-intelligence model out there. It's looking very good on the Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Intelli

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 the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol. For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024 , had

Release: llm-mcp-client 0.1a0 See this blog entry . Tags: llm , model-context-protocol

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 showing open weight models can stand toe-to-toe with proprietary frontier ones, accidental cybersecurity attacks , and public letters about Open Weights and American AI Leadership signed by almost every big name in AI (with one notable exception ). It was a great conversation, even though it's already o

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 questions about the capabilities of different models. The result is smevals , a new tool for running small eval suites across different model configurations and grading the results. The blog entry describes the tool in detail. Here's the 10 second version: Tell your coding agent to run uvx smevals

Tool: Slack Emoji Maker I wanted to create a new Slack emoji, and their tool recommends a square that's 128x128 and has a transparent background... so I had Fable build me this simple image editor against those requirements. Tags: tools , slack

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 Datasette Agent plugins to provide tools that execute custom JavaScript in the user's browser . I used this to add a debug loop to Datasette Apps in datasette-apps 0.2a0 . Tags: datasette , llm-tool-use , datasette-agent