Simon Willison Calls on AI Labs to Disclose Which Search Engines Power Their Chat Tools

Developer advocate Simon Willison argues that AI labs owe users transparency about the search backends integrated into chat products.

Simon Willison, one of the most closely followed voices in AI developer tooling, called on AI labs to disclose which search engines and retrieval backends are used when chat tools perform web searches, as posted by @simonw. The argument is straightforward: when a user asks Claude or ChatGPT a factual question and gets a web-sourced answer, they have no way of knowing whether the results come from Google, Bing, a proprietary index, or some combination.

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