Simon Willison Flags the Opus 5 Detail That Actually Matters: It Wrote Its Own Computer Vision Pipeline When It Couldn't See the Image

simonwillison.net·medium signal

Willison's July 24 Opus 5 post singles out one demo over the benchmark table — given a machine part drawing it had no direct visual access to, the model wrote its own computer vision pipeline to pull geometry from raw pixels and reconstruct a 3D model. He notes he hadn't tested it thoroughly himself (he was kayaking when it dropped) and that the faster variant costs double. He also highlights Anthropic's framing that the model got better at finding vulnerabilities through general capability gains while remaining deliberately untrained in exploitation tactics — a distinction that becomes load-bearing given this week's runaway-agent story.