2026-06-16

Simon Willison — 2026-06-16#

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The meatiest topic today is Simon’s sharp criticism of the export controls placed on Claude Fable 5. He connects the dots between a press report and security expert Katie Moussouris to point out the absurdity of penalizing an AI model for successfully fixing security vulnerabilities, which is a core feature of cyberdefense.

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The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense Simon strongly criticizes the US export controls placed on Claude Fable 5, citing security expert Katie Moussouris. The so-called “jailbreak” that triggered the ban was merely researchers asking the model to “fix this code” after it had refused a prompt to “review the code for security issues”. Simon argues that banning models for executing the “find, fix, and test loop” fundamentally misunderstands how AI assists in defensive security, effectively penalizing a model for fixing bugs.

2026-06-15

Simon Willison — 2026-06-15#

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The most exciting update today is the release of datasette-agent 0.3a0, which introduces natural language database modification right from the terminal. By combining the new execute_write_sql tool with an --unsafe auto-approval mode, Simon has made it possible to chat directly with a SQLite database and modify its schema and records on the fly.

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datasette-agent 0.3a0 · Source Simon just shipped a major update to his experimental datasette-agent project, adding an execute_write_sql tool that can prompt for user approval before writing to a database. He also enhanced the CLI chat terminal with options like --yes, --root, and --unsafe to streamline or bypass these permission checks entirely. Using the --unsafe flag alongside a model like gpt-5.5, developers can now converse directly with a specific database to execute structural changes, such as creating tables or inserting records via natural language.