Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 13th January 2026

Research String Redaction Library — Designed to detect secrets in text, the String Redaction Library leverages statistical analysis of character patterns—such as vowel/consonant ratios and digit presence—rather than relying on specific secret formats or regular expressions. It identifies highly random or non-English-like alphanumeric strings, hashes, and tokens without context awareness, making it easy to scan for hard-to-spot secrets in source code or logs.

Anthropic invests $1.5 million in the Python Software Foundation and open source security. This is outstanding news, especially given our decision to withdraw from that NSF grant application back in October.

We are thrilled to announce that Anthropic has entered into a two-year partnership with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) to contribute a landmark total of $1.5 million to support the foundation’s work, with an emphasis on Python ecosystem security. This investment will enable the PSF to make crucial security advances to CPython and the Python Package Index (PyPI) benefiting all users, and it will also sustain the foundation’s core work supporting the Python language, ecosystem, and global community.

Note that while security is a focus these funds will also support other aspects of the PSF's work:

Anthropic’s support will also go towards the PSF’s core work, including the Developer in Residence program driving contributions to CPython, community support through grants and other programs, running core infrastructure such as PyPI, and more.

# 11:58 pm / open-source, python, ai, psf, anthropic

Monday, 12th January 2026
Wednesday, 14th January 2026