Simon Willison
Creator of Datasette & Co-Creator of Django | Independent AI Security Researcher
Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, co-creator of the Django web framework, and an independent AI researcher. Simon coined the term 'Prompt Injection' in 2022 and has published seminal security research on LLM threat modeling, data exfiltration via image rendering, and sandboxing autonomous tool-using agents.
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
Datasette: Open Source Multi-Tool for Exploring and Publishing Data with SQLite
A versatile, widely deployed open-source data exploration platform created by Simon Willison, featuring rich plugin ecosystems, spatial SQL support, and LLM-assisted SQL synthesis plugins for rapid public data analysis.
Designed for analytical exploration of read-only SQLite databases; not intended as a high-concurrency transactional write database.
Context: Python web application with SQLite backend and optional OpenAI/Anthropic SQL generation plugins.
View missionPrompt Injection and Jailbreaking: Threat Modeling Autonomous LLM Tool-Call Security
Comprehensive research series documenting indirect prompt injection attack vectors, markdown image exfiltration vulnerabilities, and defense-in-depth isolation strategies for autonomous agents.
Prompt filtering heuristics fail against novel encoded or multi-turn attacks; robust security requires architectural data/instruction boundary isolation.
Context: LLM tool-call protocols, SQLite, Datasette, Python, and web security.
View mission