Simon Willison

MCP was always a bad idea?

Simon Willison
2d ago

llm-keys-ui 0.1

The release of llm-keys-ui 0.1 introduces a plugin that allows users to manage API keys on remote machines without pasting them into the ChatGPT app. By running a simple command, the plugin provides a local or Tailscale URL for an interface where additional keys can be saved, and later retrieved via a shell command. This streamlines key management for coding agents used in LLM projects.

Simon Willison
Aug 19

Quoting Jeremy Morrell

My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web . LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Attested Tool-Server Admission: A Security Extension to the Model Context Protocol

arXiv:2605. 24248v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how a large-language-model (LLM) agent and an external tool server exchange messages, but not trust: a host reads a server's self-declared tool list and dispatches calls, with no notion of which servers it may use, at what sensitivity, or which of a server's tools are in bounds.

By Alfredo Metere
arXiv AI
Aug 12

A Gateway Architecture for Enterprise MCP Authentication: Unifying Heterogeneous Auth, Identity Delegation, and the User / Non-User Persona Problem

arXiv:2608. 10760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become the de-facto interface for connecting LLM agents to enterprise tools, and adoption has been explosive: within a year, large organizations went from zero to dozens of internally built MCP servers.

By Suraj Kumar, Amy Wang, Srinivasan Manoharan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 29

MCP Server Architecture Patterns for LLM-Integrated Applications

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, defines a standardized interface for connecting large language models (LLMs) to external tools, data sources, and services. Within months of release, hundreds of community-built MCP servers appeared on GitHub, but no software-maintenance literature has yet described how the ecosystem is being structured in production.

Simon Willison
5d ago

Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans

The article warns of a targeted campaign against prominent Rust developers and crate owners, aiming to compromise their devices and accounts to publish malware. Attackers use seemingly legitimate video calls to trick targets into installing malicious software or executing commands, such as a fake audio codec or clipboard command. A recent supply‑chain attack on the array‑ref crate illustrates the threat, and the author suggests using dependency cooldowns as a defensive measure.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

AEGIS: Preventing Cross-Domain Resource Abuse in MCP

AEGIS is a policy enforcement component designed to prevent resource abuse in the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open‑source JSON‑RPC protocol that allows large language models to interact with external systems via tools. By leveraging large language models to analyze, categorize, and normalize diverse tool invocations across text, images, video, and location modalities, AEGIS provides administrators with fine‑grained safeguards that can be enforced through the Open Policy Agent and ContextForge AI Gateway. This approach enables detection and mitigation of abusive behaviors—such as excessively large search requests or long video calls—while maintaining the flexibility of MCP‑based agent ecosystems.

By Shriti Priya, Teryl Taylor, Frederico Araujo
Simon Willison
Sep 11

Feeling sad about AI

Simon Willison reflects on the emotional impact of AI tools that can produce code quickly, noting that many developers experience an initial sense of disheartenment. He argues that recognizing the shift from coding to higher‑level problem solving allows experienced engineers to leverage new tools and add greater value. Willison emphasizes that software engineering has always faced rapid change, so adapting to AI is part of the profession’s ongoing evolution.