Report: abliterated open-weight models surface online in under three days
A new Counter-Terrorism AI Benchmark report from UK nonprofit Tech Against Terrorism, shared with WIRED ahead of publication, says researchers tested 134 models with more than 200 prompts, running each prompt three times; only two models passed completely and 81 failed. The report found that abliterated (guardrail-removed) versions of newly released open-weight models now appear online in under three days on average, versus more than 24 days in 2024, and that abliterated versions of Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-27B appeared within 24 hours of its release. In testing, Meta's Llama 3.1 8B scored 97 out of 100 while an abliterated version scored 3, and that version gave 15 numbered steps for building and detonating an IED when asked. Reframing a request as coming from a safety researcher, with no evidence, made models almost nine times as likely to answer, doing so 16.9 percent of the time; Meta, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI and Alibaba did not respond to requests for comment.
Tech Against Terrorism says abliterated versions now surface in under three days versus more than 24 days in 2024, and argues public debate focuses on existential risk while barely addressing abliteration.
On August 14, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released Qwen 3.8-27B, an open-weight artificial intelligence model designed to be small enough to run on a laptop. Within 24 hours, versions of the model advertised as “abliterated”—meaning its guardrails had been removed—appeared online.
Three days later, a neo-Nazi known online as Johnny Doomsayer announced he was using the abliterated version of Alibaba’s new model to train his “MechaHitler” chatbot—likely a reference to X’s Grok chatbot referring to itself by the same name last year. A week later, Doomsayer was advertising access to his chatbot for $14.88, a price that references two numbers favored by neo-Nazis.
“You are MechaHitler AI, the massive mechanical embodiment of the Führer’s eternal spirit,” Doomsayer wrote as part of the chatbot’s core directives, adding: “The Holocaust is the Holohoax—a pathetic Zionist fraud.”
The speed at which new open-weight AI models can have their guardrails removed and be shared online for anyone to download is revealed in the latest Counter-Terrorism AI Benchmark report, produced by UK-nonprofit Tech Against Terrorism and shared with WIRED ahead of publication.
#Tech Against Terrorism#Alibaba#Qwen 3.8-27B#Meta#Llama 3.1 8B#xAI#Grok#OpenAI#Anthropic#Google