It already has been and this has been widely written about. AI was used to identify and prioritize targets for the US to bomb in Iran.

Here's an article from 2 months ago for example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2026/ma...

It was also implicated in the bombing of a girls elementary school which left 168 dead. The US did a "triple tap" to kill any first responders.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/01/dont-blam...

I think it's beyond decent. I don't understand how people are not more impressed by this. Just a few years ago the only expectation would be garbled nonsense.

the battlefield sounds much easier. worst case scenario you kill somebody, but that's what you're trying to do anyways.

if you kill somebody while trying to render a pelican on a bicycle it's a real problem.

Haha, yeah. I tried for it to create a SVG with scissors and it was hopelessly overwhelmed. I think at least the SVG design niche will be safe a little while longer

I think that's a fair tradeoff. There's no way I'm going back to writing code by hand again. No one deserves that.

On a new model release, you can guarantee two things are in the replies to Simon. One is your link, the other is "surely the models are being trained on this now"

Sure, but no one is trying to force art from most people into about every area in the economy where anyone ever pays for something visual. If you asked professional artists to draw a realistic bicycle, I'm guessing few of them would try to just randomly guess what the mechanical parts looked like

But if you need to draw a bicycle, you wouldn’t pick a random person in the street. You would hire an artist and you’d be guaranteed to have at least a believable one if not a perfect rendering.

No guarantees is why LLM is akin to gambling. Every new context is essentially picking someone out of the crowd.

As an aside, some of the renders have only a single side connection to the wheel and that is a valid bike design, the Cannondale Lefty front fork only has a left leg:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cannondale+lefty&iar=images&t=ffab

> The most unintelligible drawing has also the most unintelligible handwriting. It was made by a doctor.

Haha

low: yolo

medium: redesign bike so peli can reach bars

high: redesign bike so peli can rest on frame

xhigh: yolo

max: big peli reach bars

I like the way the max pelican has a stern look on his face

Max seems to me to be notably better than the others.

Is the output on the max level meant to be missing?

Could be an extremely high angle stem that just happens to match the downtube angle.

Maybe the pelican is just riding a road bike/gravel bike

If these were in the internal evals then the output would be much better. The 4.8 pelicans are pretty meh

Click the link

This happened to me in elementary school. We were doing fingerpaintings using plasticine. After all the bikes were hung on the wall, mine was racing the other way... Somehow it really stuck with me.

It's facing left but looking right...

And yet some people doubt Anthropic's commitment to AI safety

I don't think the API supports "max" as an option, that might just be a Claude Code harness thing.

UPDATE: My mistake, the API does support max. I added a max one at the bottom of this page (cost 43 cents): https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

I've been meaning to do a "run 3 times and pick the best" version for quite a while, I should really pull the trigger on that one. Currently it's one-shot only.

tried it myself, not much of difference

https://gist.github.com/fendy3002/3026a8c4d67d1301666ec40fc0...

looks like the model already trained well on both bicycle and pelicans

The reasoning xhigh one is pretty solid: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/gpt-5-5/#and-some-peli...

Good call, it's cute: https://gist.github.com/simonw/68560eddb0b268a8417f80ceb7304... - but nothing like GLM-5.1: shttps://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/glm-possum-esco...