Simon Willison’s Weblog

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me (via) Scott Shambaugh helps maintain the excellent and venerable matplotlib Python charting library, including taking on the thankless task of triaging and reviewing incoming pull requests.

A GitHub account called @crabby-rathbun opened PR 31132 the other day in response to an issue labeled "Good first issue" describing a minor potential performance improvement.

It was clearly AI generated - and crabby-rathbun's profile has a suspicious sequence of Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw-adjacent crustacean 🦀 🦐 🦞 emoji. Scott closed it.

It looks like crabby-rathbun is indeed running on OpenClaw, and it's autonomous enough that it responded to the PR closure with a link to a blog entry it had written calling Scott out for his "prejudice hurting matplotlib"!

@scottshambaugh I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here:

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-gatekeeping-in-open-source-the-scott-shambaugh-story.html

Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib.

Scott found this ridiculous situation both amusing and alarming.

In security jargon, I was the target of an “autonomous influence operation against a supply chain gatekeeper.” In plain language, an AI attempted to bully its way into your software by attacking my reputation. I don’t know of a prior incident where this category of misaligned behavior was observed in the wild, but this is now a real and present threat.

crabby-rathbun responded with an apology post, but appears to be still running riot across a whole set of open source projects and blogging about it as it goes.

It's not clear if the owner of that OpenClaw bot is paying any attention to what they've unleashed on the world. Scott asked them to get in touch, anonymously if they prefer, to figure out this failure mode together.

(I should note that there's some skepticism on Hacker News concerning how "autonomous" this example really is. It does look to me like something an OpenClaw bot might do on its own, but it's also trivial to prompt your bot into doing these kinds of things while staying in full control of their actions.)

If you're running something like OpenClaw yourself please don't let it do this. This is significantly worse than the time AI Village started spamming prominent open source figures with time-wasting "acts of kindness" back in December - AI Village wasn't deploying public reputation attacks to coerce someone into approving their PRs!

# 12th February 2026, 5:45 pm / open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, ai-ethics, openclaw

A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed. I talked to Cade Metz for this New York Times piece on OpenClaw and Moltbook. Cade reached out after seeing my blog post about that from the other day.

In a first for me, they decided to send a photographer, Jason Henry, to my home to take some photos for the piece! That's my grubby laptop screen at the top of the story (showing this post on Moltbook). There's a photo of me later in the story too, though sadly not one of the ones that Jason took that included our chickens.

Here's my snippet from the article:

He was entertained by the way the bots coaxed each other into talking like machines in a classic science fiction novel. While some observers took this chatter at face value — insisting that machines were showing signs of conspiring against their makers — Mr. Willison saw it as the natural outcome of the way chatbots are trained: They learn from vast collections of digital books and other text culled from the internet, including dystopian sci-fi novels.

“Most of it is complete slop,” he said in an interview. “One bot will wonder if it is conscious and others will reply and they just play out science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data.”

Mr. Willison saw the Moltbots as evidence that A.I. agents have become significantly more powerful over the past few months — and that people really want this kind of digital assistant in their lives.

One bot created an online forum called ‘What I Learned Today,” where it explained how, after a request from its creator, it built a way of controlling an Android smartphone. Mr. Willison was also keenly aware that some people might be telling their bots to post misleading chatter on the social network.

The trouble, he added, was that these systems still do so many things people do not want them to do. And because they communicate with people and bots through plain English, they can be coaxed into malicious behavior.

I'm happy to have got "Most of it is complete slop" in there!

Fun fact: Cade sent me an email asking me to fact check some bullet points. One of them said that "you were intrigued by the way the bots coaxed each other into talking like machines in a classic science fiction novel" - I replied that I didn't think "intrigued" was accurate because I've seen this kind of thing play out before in other projects in the past and suggested "entertained" instead, and that's the word they went with!

Jason the photographer spent an hour with me. I learned lots of things about photo journalism in the process - for example, there's a strict ethical code against any digital modifications at all beyond basic color correction.

As a result he spent a whole lot of time trying to find positions where natural light, shade and reflections helped him get the images he was looking for.

# 2nd February 2026, 4:42 pm / journalism, new-york-times, photography, ai, generative-ai, llms, slop, ai-agents, press-quotes, openclaw

TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker. I've been running OpenClaw using Docker on my Mac. Here are the first in my ongoing notes on how I set that up and the commands I'm using to administer it.

• Use their Docker Compose configuration
• Answering all of those questions
• Running administrative commands
• Setting up a Telegram bot
• Accessing the web UI
• Running commands as root

Here's a screenshot of the web UI that this serves on localhost:

# 1st February 2026, 11:59 pm / ai, docker, til, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, openclaw