New by me: OpenAI won’t say whose content trained its video tool. We found some clues. Gift link: wapo.st/3KeqLR0

Google's blog post on launching Gemini in Chrome does not include the word "privacy" or "security." Am I missing something or are they not addressing the very real threat of prompt injections? https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-ai-features-for-chrome/

Genius LLM eval: Uses Reddit posts on r/AmITheAsshole to test for sycophancy arxiv.org/abs/2505.13995 h/t @gerritd.bsky.social

New lawsuit against Character AI is “third high-profile case to allege an AI chatbot contributed to a teen’s death by suicide” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/16/character-ai-suicide-lawsuit-new-juliana/

A new wrongful death lawsuit alleges that Character AI and Google are liable for the death by suicide of a 13-year-old girl in Colorado, Juliana Peralta This is the third wrongful death claim against a popular AI app for a teen's death by suicide this year www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Gift link to my developing story on Anthropic's historic settlement with book authors and publishers: wapo.st/47r1gFT More updates to come.

Big news in the AI copyright space: Anthropic reaches landmark $1.5B settlement with book authors https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/05/anthropic-book-authors-copyright-settlement/

Great analysis of how Grok's political bias has changed. NYT tested Grok on a political bias survey, using different versions of its system prompt. Shows much tweaking these system prompts affects model outputs. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/elon-musk-grok-conservative-chatbot.html

Published a project I've been wanting to do for years, on how every day is apparently some ridiculous holiday. https://wapo.st/4lVJr5h Oh, and Happy Pierce Your Ears Day, to those who celebrate!

More testing of LLMs for journalism, this time on identifying image location, date, and source. By @aisvarya17.bsky.social and @klaudia.bsky.social with some of my own commentary. www.cjr.org/tow_center/w... @columjournreview.bsky.social

Lovely analysis of how Claude Code works: - Runs on one loop. If task is complex, clones itself, with one loop. - Uses its small model (Haiku) majority of the time - System prompt includes a lot of "IMPORTANT" and "VERY IMPORTANT" instructions, which, lol minusx.ai/blog/decodin...

Devastating story, must read. > ... at one critical moment, ChatGPT discouraged Adam from cluing his family in. ... “Please don't leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html

I'm not saying I called it but I did put on midnights before lunch

This tool looks interesting: runs web search per row in a spreadsheet, and then uses an llm to do something with the results (like categorize, or maybe extract some info) https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-fuels/augmenta-new-tool-for-ai-classification-and-research/

What a fun LLM eval, draw a world map pixel by pixel with this prompt: "If this location is over land, say 'Land'. If this location is over water, say 'Water'. Do not say anything else. x° S, y° W" Somehow, it kinda works? https://outsidetext.substack.com/p/how-does-a-blind-model-see-the-earth

A brutal account: What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-health-suicide.html

The political fundraising email eval is officially too easy https://kschaul.com/llm-evals/evals/political-fundraising-emails/

Released `jump-start` as a CLI. Now you can search and use your starters from the command line! If you don't know jump-start, it's basically a shortcut to your favorite code. Put it in a structured GitHub repo, and jump-start turns it into a website. Here's mine: kschaul.com/jump-start/

Didn't realize Anthropic had created dxt: a one-click install for MCP servers --> www.anthropic.com/engineering/...

Fascinating blog post that rethinks how to use LLMs for programming tasks by writing a "program" in markdown and storing "state" in json files --> mariozechner.at/posts/2025-0...

MCP server for accessing Guardian articles --> https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/a-new-tool-lets-your-favorite-ai-model-talk-with-1-9-million-articles-in-the-guardian/

This is by far the most interesting thing I've consumed all week. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QWP... h/t @kottke.org

New post: Today I’m releasing a new Python command-line library that allows users to ask questions of federal campaign finance filings by leveraging large language models, with some built-in help. thescoop.org/archives/202...

There are some interesting details about how Anthropic trained their models tucked away in today's summary judgement: they bought, chopped up and scanned millions of dollars worth of books! simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/24/...

Seems great for exploring embeddings --> https://apple.github.io/embedding-atlas/

Fun project --> https://monroeclinton.com/counting-all-yurts-in-mongolia/

Useful report on news consumption --> https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/for-the-first-time-social-media-overtakes-tv-as-americans-top-news-source/

A lot of people say generative AI shouldn't infringe on copyright. These researchers actually tried to do it. The result: an 8 terabyte dataset of text that's openly licensed or in the public domain & 7 B parameter model that performs as well as Meta's Llama 7B www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Just released a plugin for `llm` to pull in U.S. legislation as fragments, enabling you to do stuff like: - llm -f bill:hr1-119 'Anything AI-related in here?' - llm -f bill:hr1-119:section-110101 'Is there language in here to prevent fraud?' github.com/kevinschaul/...

The best `llm` CLI program now supports tool-calling, very excited about these possibilities --> https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/27/llm-tools/

Working on a Datawrapper MCP server. Try it out, if you're into this kind of thing? --> github.com/kevinschaul/... cc @datawrapper.de

We love baseball + charts

I hooked Claude up to Adobe Illustrator (using MCP), pasted in a message from a copy editor and asked it to make the changes. It worked. My mind is blown. More details and how to get set up here: kschaul.com/post/2025/05...

Great investigation --> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/05/19/live-facial-recognition-police-new-orleans/

How reliable are LLMs at extracting data from pdfs? Inspired by @simonwillison.net's PyCon talk, I added extracting FEMA's daily operation briefing to my LLM evals suite. Just one model extracted the data from the pdf correctly: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview. Full results -> kschaul.com/llm-evals/ev...

✨ It's new samwho visual essay o'clock! ✨ Reservoir sampling is one of my favourite algorithms. It allows you to sample from a set without knowing the size of that set. I try to assume no prior knowledge, and use no scary math notation. Just beautiful visuals. Let me know what you think! ❤️

Just click --> https://neal.fun/internet-roadtrip/

hello take a break from all the everything and enjoy an explosion of fabric and fun

Made a lil plugin for `llm` that only actually calls the llm if it's a new prompt. Should save a little time and money, especially when running evals. --> https://github.com/kevinschaul/llm-cache-plugin

Announcing Datasette for Newsrooms - a hosted version of @datasette.io specifically targeted at newsrooms and data journalists Think of it as a library for your data - load in CSVs and JSON, extract data with LLMs, collaborate on analysis with the rest of your team simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/24/...

Mitigating prompt injections by building a custom Python interpreter. Very cool research here. --> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/

Got v1 of my llm evals dashboard set up. Check it out: kschaul.com/llm-evals/ev...

"Finnish company Check First scoured Wikipedia and turned up nearly 2,000 hyperlinks on pages in 44 languages that pointed to 162 Pravda websites." --> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-poisoning-grooming-chatbots-russia/

Judge Boasberg finds probable cause for contempt of court (!) in flight deportations case, citing in part a Washington Post graphic I made outlining the timing of flights and his orders. Very cool to see this impact. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Must read --> https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security

New blog post: You need your own LLM evals. Here's how I set mine up. kschaul.com/post/2025/04... featuring some great test cases from @dwillis.bsky.social

Marimekko chart alert --> www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

The US government holds a tremendous amount of data about US citizens. Now, The Trump administration is trying to access that data and link it together. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/u...

💥 HUGE news: Today, our Washington Post colleagues announced @wapotechguild. With a majority of over 300 tech workers signing cards in support, they’re seeking voluntary recognition.