Yes, the type signature for JSON.parse() isn't inferred/deduced, it's explicit in lib.es5.d.ts (imported from lib.d.ts): https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScrip

Yes, the type signature for JSON.parse() isn't inferred/deduced, it's explicit in lib.es5.d.ts (imported from lib.d.ts): https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/lib/lib.es5.d.ts#L1059 https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/lib/lib.... You could provide your own lib.d.ts with `unknown` type returned for JSON.parse. I'm almost surprised there isn't a standard stricter lib.d.ts, though I suppose that linters fill enough of those needs with their rulesets. Looking at GitHub issues surrounding it, it doesn't appear that there has been an explicit ask to switch the type signature to use `unknown`, probably the next closest was this one, where `unknown` is mentioned in a comment as a possibility but the comment is not addressed in follow up discussion: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/26993 https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/26993 It would be a big breaking change though at this point, so they would probably be hesitant to do so. I thought I saw somewhere there was a proposal to add it as a compiler flag to treat all uses of `any` in lib.d.ts as `unknown`, but I have no idea what happened to that proposal and quick searches don't turn up anything.