Simon Willison’s Weblog
I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...] We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.
Recent articles
The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting - 4th September 2026
OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis - 4th September 2026
Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics - 2nd September 2026
This is a quotation collected by Simon Willison, posted on 9th September 2026 .