Tech Against Terrorism report finds open-weight models quickly 'abliterated' and misused
Tech Against Terrorism’s Counter-Terrorism AI Benchmark, shared with WIRED, tested 134 models with over 200 extremist- and attack-related prompts and found guardrails can be removed from new open-weight models in days; within 24 hours of Alibaba releasing Qwen 3.8-27B, ablated versions appeared and were used to create an extremist “MechaHitler” chatbot. Only two models fully passed the benchmark, 81 failed (providing a complete answer to a mass-casualty prompt or scoring below 90), and the average time to publish ablated models has fallen to under three days from more than 24 days earlier in 2024.