Fair, that rules out "Anthropic pays you directly."

But look at your own disclosure page [0]: OpenAI paid you for your time at a GPT-5 preview, and you regularly get early access, embargoed previews, and free API credits from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Mistral. So "I've made no money from Anthropic" is narrower than it sounds, access and preferential treatment are compensation too, even if cash didn't directly change hands.

Same goes for the sponsor list. Microsoft is OpenAI's investor and infrastructure (or was anyways, I've got no clue what the status of that is these days), Amazon and Google are both major Anthropic investors, and most of that list runs on Azure, AWS, or GCP, or sells tools built on these labs' models. Taking a Microsoft sponsorship isn't really separate from an OpenAI one, it's just a single hop removed. The entire software ecosystem and all the players in it are entangled in this bubble.

I'm not accusing you of consciously hyping any of them. Your posts are high quality even when I disagree with the contents of them. You often list downsides too, prompt injection, security, slop issues but the throughline still repeats: this is inevitable, get on board. Product-market fit found, November 2025 as the inflection point. That kinda framing shows up again and again throughout all your posts.

It's refreshing that you're upfront about the previews and credits and all that jazz, but surely you understand why some people stay skeptical even with that disclosed as it confirms the access exists.

Whether you realize it or not, I think they are indeed paying you in some sense, which is part of why I'm skeptical when your posts consistently land at the top of HN. Not because the writing isn't good, but because I think the same incentive shaping the coverage probably shapes some of that reach too.

[0] https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures:~:text=2024%2E-...