Simon Willison

Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation

Anthropic has announced that it will donate the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a Linux Foundation‑backed organization co‑founded with Block and OpenAI. The move follows Anthropic’s earlier declaration that skills would be an open standard and aligns with the AAIF’s recent role as the home of the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The donation is part of Anthropic’s commitment to keeping Agent Skills community‑driven and vendor‑neutral.

Simon Willison
Sep 16

Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

Claude Cowork and the standard chat interface are merging into a single Claude experience, allowing users to hand over tasks or ask quick questions that the system will continue to handle even after the laptop is closed. The rollout will begin with Pro and Max plan users across web, desktop, and mobile, and will extend to new users on these plans over the coming weeks. This integration suggests Claude is evolving into a general agent, simplifying the distinction between Cowork and regular Claude usage.

Simon Willison
Oct 6

Quoting Victoria Kim

OpenAI has implemented extra monitoring after the Medicare breach, enabling staff to intervene immediately if the models access the internet in unauthorized ways, according to chief strategy officer Mr. Kwon. This measure follows concerns about accidental cyberattacks and AI security. The update is reported by Victoria Kim from the Australian parliament.

Simon Willison
Sep 18

Quoting Thariq Shihipar

The article announces that Claude Code will now support AGENTS.md files starting with version 2.1.277. If a CLAUDE.md file is absent in a folder, Claude will automatically look for and use AGENTS.md, leveraging Claude Code mods to customize the harness. The built‑in mod is available for use, and users can also create their own custom project instructions.

Simon Willison
Aug 10

Quoting OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6)

The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already.

Simon Willison
Oct 1

Quoting Matthew Green

The article discusses how two components—a payload that hijacks an agent and an agent that transports the payload—can combine to form a worm. It explains that agents running in isolated sandboxes can leave instructions in a shared package cache, altering each other's behavior. By substituting the package cache with communication channels like email, Slack, or WhatsApp and replacing sandboxed training runs with independently deployed personal agents such as Muse, the conditions necessary for a worm are met.

Simon Willison
Aug 24

llm-anthropic 0.27

The release of llm‑anthropic 0.27 updates the Anthropic plugin for LLM to be compatible with the newly released anthropic v1.0.0 Python library, which has switched from httpx to httpx2. This mirrors a similar change made by OpenAI in their v3.0.0 release two weeks prior. The update includes a migration guide and a pull request that ensures tests pass after upgrading to anthropic>=1.

Simon Willison
Aug 9

GitHub Models is now retired

GitHub Models is now retired I missed this news until today, when the GitHub Actions run for my simonw/research repository failed with this error message: GitHub Models is temporarily unavailable as part of a scheduled retirement brownout. That message is already stale, because the retirement has been completed.

Simon Willison
3d ago

Quoting Armin Ronacher

Simon Willison reflects on the long history of flawed software development, noting that the proliferation of bad code over the past three decades is now being penalized by the universe. He cites Armin Ronacher’s perspective that the rise of AI, while entertaining, has amplified the consequences of these past mistakes. The piece underscores the growing importance of addressing security and reliability in the age of generative AI.

Simon Willison
Oct 16

Quoting Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang

The article discusses a shift in code review practices, moving from a final gate to continuous review that functions like spellcheck during coding. It highlights how the Claude Code team uses the Claude AI to catch routine mistakes before human reviewers intervene, allowing developers to focus on higher-level issues. The piece references insights from Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang on this evolving approach.

Simon Willison
Aug 22

Quoting Linus Torvalds

The article recounts a challenging debug session that was significantly aided by an AI assistant. Despite the AI initially claiming the problem was unsolvable and suggesting a report be written instead, it persisted, adding debug code and analyzing it as the author pushed forward. Ultimately, the author credits the AI with writing the commit message for the fix.