Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI)
Simon Willison argues that AI agents should never be designated as Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) because machines cannot be held accountable, revealing a fundamental limit for AI in organizational management.
Simon Willison · Jul 13, 2026
Quoting Josh W. Comeau
Multiple developer course creators report revenue drops of over 50% as AI both shakes confidence in career prospects and offers free personalized learning alternatives, posing a serious challenge to traditional tech education.
Simon Willison · Jul 4, 2026
Quoting Andreas Kling
Ladybird browser now rejects public pull requests because AI-generated code blurs contributor responsibility, highlighting a trust crisis that open-source faces in the AI era.
Simon Willison · Jun 6, 2026
FTC to Require Cox Media Group, Two Other Firms to Pay Nearly $1 Million to Settle Charges They Deceived Customers About “Active Listening” AI-Powered Marketing Service
The FTC fined three companies for falsely advertising an AI 'active listening' service that was actually just reselling email lists. This case confirms that the 'phone spying for ads' conspiracy is often a marketing scam, not real technology.
Simon Willison · May 22, 2026
Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm
An experiment where an AI autonomously runs a real-world cafe sparked ethical debate due to absurd procurement and causing trouble for external parties, revealing the deeper issue of AI agents lacking a sense of boundaries in the physical world.
Simon Willison · May 6, 2026
Quoting Andy Masley
Andy Masley counters the 'data centers cause farmland loss' narrative with data showing agricultural efficiency gains far outpace data center land use, revealing the real issue is local economic impact vs. global storytelling.
Simon Willison · May 5, 2026
The Zig project's rationale for their firm anti-AI contribution policy
The Zig project bans LLM-generated contributions because it invests in people, not code, believing AI assistance disrupts the process of cultivating trusted contributors.
Simon Willison · Apr 30, 2026
The people do not yearn for automation
The article highlights a cognitive gap between tech elites with 'software brain' and the general public, arguing that AI's popularity hasn't made people yearn for automation, but rather反感 its flattening of human experience.
Simon Willison · Apr 25, 2026
Why We Think
Lilian Weng explores how AI models can enhance reasoning and decision-making by simulating human thought processes, providing new insights for future model design.
Lilian Weng · May 1, 2025
Short Story on AI: Forward Pass
This short story explores the consciousness of an AI model through self-reflection, challenging our understanding of intelligence.
Andrej Karpathy · Mar 27, 2021
Claude is a space to think
Anthropic declares Claude will remain permanently ad-free, arguing that advertising incentives are fundamentally incompatible with the core goal of an AI assistant being genuinely helpful.
Anthropic News ·
Our position on open-weights models
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei clarifies the company has never advocated for banning open-weights models, and warns that the real national security nightmares—authoritarian military AI and model misuse—can't be solved by protectionist bans.
Anthropic News ·
May 14, 2026AnnouncementsAnthropic forms $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation
Anthropic partners with the Gates Foundation in a $200 million deal to deploy AI in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility, signaling a shift where AI's true frontier lies in addressing market failures.
Anthropic News ·
May 19, 2026AnnouncementsWidening the conversation on frontier AI
Anthropic is engaging with thinkers from religious, philosophical, and other fields to explore how to cultivate 'good character' in AI, incorporating insights like 'moral formation' and a 'safe other' tool into Claude's training experiments.
Anthropic News ·
When an AI Godfather Meets the Pope: A Dialogue on the Soul of Technology
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah's Vatican speech reveals the deep dilemmas in AI development: conflicts between commercial incentives and safety ethics, unequal global distribution of benefits, and the ultimate question of technology's impact on human flourishing.
Anthropic News ·
May 27, 2026AnnouncementsAnthropic opens Milan office to support Italian enterprise, research, and developers
Anthropic opens its sixth European office in Milan, partnering with leading Italian enterprises in finance, energy, and design, signaling accelerated AI adoption and cultural integration in traditional industries.
Anthropic News ·
Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI
Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical on AI offers profound and accessible insights into AI development from the perspectives of human dignity, labor rights, and ethics.
Simon Willison ·
Quoting Mo Bitar
A satirical TikTok quote reveals the survival anxiety and absurd reality of 'performative automation' in the AI era.
Simon Willison ·
Quoting Paul Graham
Paul Graham observes that AI-written emails from founders, with their unnatural journalistic style and lack of authenticity, damage trust and highlight a core challenge of human communication in the AI era.
Simon Willison ·
The pressure
curl's lead maintainer, Daniel Stenberg, reveals that an unprecedented flood of high-quality, AI-assisted security vulnerability reports is putting immense pressure on the open-source project's team.
Simon Willison ·