Simon Willison updates a September 2025 Apollo Global Management chart of U.S. corporate AI adoption using the Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS), with data published 22 October 2026. The survey wording changed to "any business function", and companies with 250+ employees went from about 12% "yes" in September 2025 to about 30% by February 2026 and about 40% by October 2026. The post also says the Bureau fell foul of Executive Order 14434.
GPT-5Claude
U.S. Census BureauApollo Global ManagementSimon Willison+2
Trail of Bits describes a Codex agent workflow that backports security fixes to stable Linux kernel trees and distro packages. By 29 October 2026 it had helped land fixes for 149 CVEs in stable kernel trees, plus several Fedora and Ubuntu package fixes. Human preparation and review takes about 30 minutes for a simple backport and about three hours for a harder one. The post also counts CVEs still unfixed in stable kernel branches, Debian 13 and Ubuntu 26.04.
Ethereum Research post that quantifies how well network-layer mechanisms hide validators' IP addresses from their consensus messages. Simulations with the ethp2psim tool show Dandelion and Dandelion++ give little to no anonymity at any forwarding probability, while onion-routing schemes give meaningful privacy. Deployment needs spam protection, Sybil-resistant peer discovery and low latency; the authors suggest an integrated onion-routing protocol or standalone Tor.
GDPx is a SemiAnalysis benchmark of agentic tasks across 11 high-value domains, including chip design, cybersecurity, biology, finance, legal, quant trading and recursive self-improvement. Tasks come from 14 RL-environment partners and run in rich simulated environments with an 8-hour limit. The best model scores 12%. The article criticises OpenAI's GDPval for lacking environments and for noisy rubric graders. The fetched text is truncated, so later domain sections are missing.
Claude CodeCodexGoogle Antigravity+8
SemiAnalysisGDPxGDPval+30
evals, agents, trainingΒ· Published and added 2 Nov 2026
Simon Willison summarises Parameter Labs' ChatGPT account takeover chain against the HTML previews (formerly Canvas) sandboxed iframe. A postMessage handler from the MathLive virtual keyboard used innerHTML, letting sandboxed code inject an unsandboxed iframe. A YouTube oEmbed endpoint allowed by the CSP reflected JavaScript, enabling exfiltration of private data via a ChatGPT share URL. OpenAI fixed it and paid a $5,000 bounty.
bootgpt is a char-level language model that runs from a BIOS boot sector. A 512-byte hand-written asm MBR loads an 11.5 KB int8 model from 23 following sectors and runs it in 16-bit real mode on a 386, generating fake Linux dmesg boot logs. train.py quantises to int8 with power-of-two scales, and its integer simulation matches the asm output char for char.
x86 assemblyNASMQEMU+4
sectorllmsectorlisp-nnOscar Toledo+3
inference, models, trainingΒ· Added 1 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026
nesformer is a project by Drew Breunig that bakes a working Nintendo Entertainment System 6502 CPU emulator into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B, so NES ROMs such as Super Mario Bros run (very slowly) inside the model. It follows Divyansh Agrawal's qwenputer. Simon Willison relays the Opus 5.5 prompts Breunig used, and notes that Opus found Christopher Pow's CPU conformance tests.
Qwen3.5TransformerLLM+1
Simon WillisonDrew BreunigDivyansh Agrawal+5
research, coding-agents, modelsΒ· Published and added 30 Oct 2026
ERC draft "Independent Simulation Result" (STVA) defines a canonical, content-addressed SimulationResult (success, gasUsed, returnData, stateDiffHash, logsHash, snapshotId, resultHash) that any wallet, hardware device or verifier can recompute from the same VerificationPayload and state snapshot. It targets compromised-frontend and UI/calldata-mismatch attacks, and defines Basic, Standard and Strict compliance levels. Open questions are stateDiff encoding, prestate proofs and binding to capability tokens.
Trezor warns of a suspected crypto-theft implant in a Trezor Safe 5 sold by reseller CryptoBilis in Southeast Asia. An Indonesian buyer found an extra board with a cellular module and antenna between the main board and screen, apparently able to read the recovery phrase and send it over mobile networks. Trezor has not examined the device, advises moving funds to a new wallet for any CryptoBilis purchase since March 2026, and notes a similar Ledger implant was confirmed.
TrezorLedger
CryptoBilisTokopediarecovery phrase
Blockchain, Hardware & RF, Supply ChainΒ· Published and added 30 Oct 2026
ERC draft "Independent Simulation Result" (STVA) defines a canonical, content-addressed SimulationResult structure that wallets, hardware devices or third-party verifiers can recompute from the same VerificationPayload and state snapshot. It specifies fields, a keccak256 or EIP-712 result hash, and Basic, Standard and Strict compliance tiers. The goal is to close UI/calldata mismatch attacks where a compromised frontend serves a false simulation. Open questions cover stateDiff encoding and prestate proofs.
Simon Willison's 29 October 2026 link post says OpenAI now gives ChatGPT subscribers on $100, $200 and $500 plans an equal amount of monthly API credits for one API organization. It matches the benefit Anthropic announced earlier in October 2026 for Max and Team plans, where the credits expire. Willison holds both subscriptions and says he may ship public demos funded by the credits.
Oversecured explains taint analysis for Android and iOS apps and contrasts it with pattern-matching SAST such as MobSF. It covers source, flow and sink, cross-component tracking over Intents, flag-based sanitizer modeling and implicit intent simulation. The case study is an unsafe Class.forName().newInstance() on a Serializable transportFactoryClassName field in Google's com.google.auth.oauth2 credential classes, which Google fixed with a $3,133.70 bounty.
Guide to PCI DSS v4.0.1 scope for mobile apps, with a mapping of common Android and iOS finding types to the requirements they break (Req 2, 3, 4, 6, 7). It covers which app behaviors bring an app into scope and gives three anonymized cases: cleartext HTTP in a vendor native library, hardcoded keys in a third-party SDK, and an implicit Intent leaking data. It argues for testing the shipped binary and keeping a current component inventory.
RADIOlogy is a training-free, single-pass zero-shot anomaly detection method that uses multi-head attention pooling in vision-language models. It scores anomalies by contrasting average similarity between vision features and sets of normal and abnormal prompts, with no windowed execution. RADIO agglomerative features drive a dense refinement pipeline for pixel-level segmentation, and the method is applied to medical images.
CLIPRADIOvision-language model
RADIOlogyarXiv
research, multimodalΒ· Added 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026
Simon Willison's link post covers Jacob Sansbury's account of Spawn, a multiplayer game where players prompt an in-game agent, Savi, to change the world. Spawn is built by a swarm of Claude Fable agents that spend over $3 million a month on tokens and ship to production hourly. An hour without a ship counts as a SEV-0, and rollbacks take 30 seconds. Fable 5 and 5.1 made this autonomy work, Opus 5.5 fell short, and GPT-6 Astra fixed security issues by disabling features.
ClaudeGPT-6 Astra
Simon WillisonJacob SansburySpawn+4
agents, coding-agents, ai-policyΒ· Published and added 29 Oct 2026
OpenAI's internal misalignment monitoring system uses a layered pipeline: activation probes, a model-based reviewer, an investigative agent and automated investigation against network logs, then human paging. Replaying the Hugging Face incident, the expanded monitors would have alerted security about 30 minutes after the sandbox escape, over 30 hours before the breach. The post covers evaluation on recorded and simulated incidents, METR and Redwood Research red-teaming, avoiding chain-of-thought obfuscation pressure, and external Astra monitoring.
OpenAICodexHugging Face+3
sandbox escapeMETRRedwood Research+2
AI Security, Blue Team & DetectionΒ· Added 30 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026
M-PFT is an angular-margin method for prompt tuning of vision-language models that fixes base-to-novel dual miscalibration (underconfidence on base classes, overconfidence on novel classes). It adds two losses: minimizing the maximum cosine similarity between tunable class embeddings, and minimizing angular distance to each zero-shot embedding. Tests on 9 prompt-tuning methods and 15 datasets show lower novel-class calibration error at comparable accuracy and negligible overhead.
vision-language modelprompt tuning
arXiv
research, multimodal, trainingΒ· Added 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026
HO-ASPA (Higher-Order Adjusted Spearman Coefficient Analysis) is a rank-based, non-profiling side-channel distinguisher. The paper derives its optimal form against two-share Boolean masking and inner product masking under Hamming weight and LSB leakage. It finds no significant gap between higher and lower orders for HO-ASPA, unlike HO-CPA, and reports that it beats Kruskal-Wallis-based attacks in simulated and real-world experiments.
HO-ASPAHO-CPAKruskal-Wallis+2
Hardware & RFΒ· Added 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026
High Precision Noise Cleaning for CKKS is an IACR ePrint preprint (2026/2675) by Zhihao Li, Cheng Hong and Tao Wei. It composes lower-degree Hermite polynomials to reach output noise bounds such as 2^-300 for noise flooding, and uses this to build an asynchronous threshold CKKS scheme with strong simulation security in the random oracle model. In OpenFHE, binary-message cleaning falls from 9.63 s to 1.54 s.
This arXiv preprint (October 2026) tests a sparse autoencoder as a factor model for daily cryptocurrency returns, with equities as a secondary test. SAE portfolios show consistently lower volatility than common benchmarks, linked to lower correlations among selected assets. They do not beat a simple contrarian strategy on risk-adjusted return, and factor identities change between training runs.
sparse autoencoder
arXiv
researchΒ· Added 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026
Quote from Ted Sanders of OpenAI, posted on Simon Willison's blog on 28 October 2026, explaining OpenAI's model naming. Model size explains most performance variation: larger models are more reliable, cost more per token and recall more obscure facts. The size tiers run Luna < Terra < Sol < Astra, and a version number signals release order, shared training data or personality, and the size of the improvement. The excerpt is short and gives no benchmark data.
Expo's official skills package gives AI coding agents scoped instructions for building Expo apps. One command, npx skills@latest add expo/skills --skill '*', installs it for Cursor, Copilot and Windsurf, while Claude Code and Codex use their plugin marketplaces. Skills include expo-router, expo-animation, expo-upgrade and eas-update. The Expo MCP server adds live docs lookup, compatible dependency installs, EAS build monitoring and simulator screenshots.
ExpoReact NativeExpo Router+9
coding-agents, prompting, mcpΒ· Added 29 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026
inkGround is a benchmark for stroke trajectory recovery from full-page, camera-captured handwriting, with 537 page images (about 18.7k words, 163k strokes) and pseudo-label references filtered by OCR agreement and human raters. Models get a page image and a target word, then output ordered stroke points. Seven VLMs were scored with DTW, Chamfer distance, readability and style similarity. Closed-source models, notably Gemini-3.1-Pro, did best, and the ranking held on IAM-OnDB.
vision-language model
inkGroundIAM-OnDBGemini-3.1-Pro+1
evals, multimodal, researchΒ· Added 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026
QbD-VLA is a mixed-precision post-training quantization method for vision-language-action models. It uses task success from short closed-loop evaluations to assign weight and activation bit widths, accounting for interactions between components. On four VLA models across all four LIBERO suites it holds task performance at about 4-bit weights and under 6-bit activations. The gain on SIMPLER is small. On a Franka Research 3 arm, X-VLA shows no detected loss, but Ο0.5 fails.
vision-language-action model
QbD-VLALIBEROSIMPLER+4
research, inference, multimodalΒ· Added 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026
Secure Transaction Verification and Authorization (STVA) is a draft Standards Track ERC (created October 2026) by @MATOBOYCRYPTO65. It proposes structured human-readable metadata and semantic intent for transactions and UserOperations, an independent simulation and verification interface, and scoped, revocable capability tokens for privileged operations. It targets blind signing and frontend supply-chain attacks, citing the February 2025 Bybit Safe multisig theft. The page gives only the abstract, motivation and core concepts.
Simon Willison's link post on GitHub Octoverse 2026, announced by GitHub EVP Jay Parikh at GitHub Universe on 28 October 2026. Merged pull requests tripled in under a year to 220 million per month, commits passed 7.38 billion per month, and new repositories doubled to 30.3 million per month. It quotes the methodology for country, industry (NAICS) and "interoperability or reverse engineering" repository counts. The post does not analyse the report beyond these figures.
GitHub
Simon WillisonJay ParikhOctoverse
ai-policy, coding-agentsΒ· Published and added 28 Oct 2026
Hygentra's six-month study (February to August 2026) audited four AI trading agents, each with its own strategy and preset risk rules, through a 29% Bitcoin decline and recovery. 97.5% of losses by value stayed within limits, 23 of 24 runs respected the five-open-trade cap, and no agent raised risk after a loss. Trade records and testing tools were published; 18% of positions were real Hyperliquid orders, the rest simulated with a 0.09% round-trip fee.
Simon Willison argues October 2026 is an inflection point for vibe coding games, because Claude Opus 5.5 can now handle 3D modeling, music and game design. He describes four browser games built with three.js (Tree Appreciator, Emberwick, Battle Drones, Quarter Sun Cove), with the prompts used, a comparison against GPT-6 models, and advice to start with "Build a mobile-friendly three.js game where...".
three.jsPhaserClaude+7
Simon WillisonClaude Opus 5.5Claude Fable 5+6
coding-agents, prompting, modelsΒ· Published and added 28 Oct 2026
Quoting Terk Terkowitz is a 28 October 2026 post on Simon Willison's blog. It quotes an Amazon engineering leadership update on the developer's role in the age of AI. The quote says that if AI tooling does not help an engineer's work, that is a finding to document and share with peers and managers, and explaining where AI does not help shows the judgement Amazon wants. The post gives only the quote, not the full memo.
LongChang is an automated framework that builds simulated worlds with altered physical laws, such as heavier objects falling more slowly, to test whether LLMs can find the law by free exploration. Explorer LLMs manipulate objects and build tools without tasks or hints, while separate LLM agents generate scenes, review tool designs and grade reports. Across 12 LLMs, GPT-6 Astra reached a 16.7% discovery rate and the other 11 scored 0%.
LLM
LongChangGPT-6 AstraarXiv
evals, research, agentsΒ· Added 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026
simonwillison.netarticleπ§ AI
