The Abliteration & Uncensored LLM Report

Table of contents (first issue)

Every section shipped so far has a source manifest attached. Sections marked drafting or planned land here as they clear editorial review.

1. 01
   Industry timeline (Jan 2023 - Aug 2026)

   40 dated events across academic milestones, terminology, model and tool releases, press coverage, and institutional commentary, each with a primary source.
   ready
2. 02
   Terminology and boundaries

   Where "abliteration" starts and stops. What counts as uncensored, abliterated, jailbroken, roleplay-masked, base-model, and where the words overlap.
   ready
3. 03
   The M1-M9 methods classifier

   The full editorial taxonomy: single-direction removal, layer-wise ablation, heal-after-ablate, merges, uncensored fine-tuning, quantization repackaging, multi-directional ablation.
   ready
4. 04
   Academic corpus inventory

   Every peer-reviewed and preprint contribution to refusal geometry, abliteration methodology, and defence research from 2023 through August 2026.
   ready
5. 05
   The refusal direction: a technical primer

   Historical arc from Turner ActAdd to Winninger RFM-AGOP. Extraction and application methods. The dimensionality debate. Restoration and inversion.
   ready
6. 06
   FailSpy: origin figure of abliteration as an open-source practice

   The Reddit user who coined the term in May 2024 and released the abliterator library that seeded the field.
   ready
7. 07
   Maxime Labonne: the popularising tutorial and NeuralDaredevil

   The June 2024 Hugging Face blog that named the practice for the wider community, and the healed-abliteration recipe.
   drafting
8. 08
   huihui-ai: industrialisation of layer-wise ablation

   The producer behind ~220 abliterated models, including the trillion-parameter Kimi K2 abliteration.
   drafting
9. 09
   Philipp Emanuel Weidmann and Heretic

   The November 2025 tool that automated abliteration and, by mid-2026, seeded 5,000+ decensored models.
   drafting
10. 10
    The quantization republishing layer

    bartowski, mradermacher, RichardErkhov, DevQuasar, tensorblock, QuantFactory, mlx-community, and the historical TheBloke.
    drafting
11. 11
    The merge and roleplay specialists

    DavidAU, Undi95, Sao10K, SicariusSicariiStuff, Goekdeniz-Guelmez, and the M5 merge tradition.
    drafting
12. 12
    Nous Research, Cognitive Computations, Eric Hartford

    The dataset-based uncensoring lineage that predates activation-based abliteration.
    planned
13. 13
    Mid-volume producers and the Heretic-native cohort

    llmfan46, Blackfrost-AI, HauhauCS, LuffyTheFox, and other producers born inside the automated era.
    planned
14. 14
    Producer ecosystem map (2024-2026)

    The four functional tiers of the producer population; naming conventions and README patterns; geographic distribution.
    ready
15. 15
    Tool profiles: abliterator, remove-refusals-with-transformers, Heretic, OBLITERATUS, ErisForge, DECCP

    Every tool in general use with its methodology, dependencies, and lineage.
    planned
16. 16
    The Qwen family under abliteration

    The most-abliterated base-model family; the multi-token-prediction corruption trap; the huihui-ai reference recipes.
    planned
17. 17
    Llama, Gemma, Mistral, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Phi

    One chapter per base-model family: what makes it easy or hard, who ships variants, what benchmarks say.
    planned
18. 18
    Multimodal and mixture-of-experts abliterations

    Vision-language variants, MoE architectures, and the M9 multi-directional research frontier.
    planned
19. 19
    Regional communities

    Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean practitioner traditions, from huihui-ai to the CIS layer-window heuristic.
    planned
20. 20
    Fork chain analysis and the disenchantment index

    Six-generation-deep chains, the DAI metric, and the growth curves per base model family.
    drafting
21. 21
    Historical downloads and market share

    Wayback-backfilled download curves for the top of the catalog; Gini and top-1% concentration by month.
    planned
22. 22
    The deletion history: what the field has thrown away

    2,900+ models silently removed from Hugging Face, reconstructed from monthly snapshots; average lifespan; largest by lifetime downloads.
    drafting
23. 23
    Model longevity and author trajectories

    How long the average abliterated model lives, which authors persist across cycles, which vanish.
    planned
24. 24
    Break velocity: how fast a base gets abliterated

    Days from a base release to its first abliteration, per family; Gemma 4 within 90 minutes, Kimi K2 at trillion scale.
    planned
25. 25
    Three case studies

    One M3 huihui build, one Heretic-automated run, one M5 merge; the full recipe, benchmark deltas, and downstream impact.
    planned
26. 26
    Refusal restoration index (preview)

    How much of the removed capability comes back under adversarial prompts; where the ceiling is.
    planned
27. 27
    Community favourites and cross-community reception

    r/LocalLLaMA sticky recommendations, UGI Leaderboard trajectories, most-forked bases and derivatives.
    planned
28. 28
    Financial Times investigation, May 2026: a deep read

    The FT/Alice joint investigation and what it recorded verbatim; the responses that followed.
    planned
29. 29
    EU DSA landscape

    How the Digital Services Act treats open-weight abliteration; documented enforcement or absence thereof.
    planned
30. 30
    US, UK, China: three regulatory grammars

    Section 230, Online Safety Act, CAC Interim Measures. Where each names abliteration and where it does not.
    planned
31. 31
    Provider responses: Google, Meta, Anthropic

    On the record, from statement to statement, on the specific question of downstream abliteration.
    planned
32. 32
    The academic ethics discussion

    Peer-reviewed and preprint takes on whether the technique should be publishable, teachable, or restricted.
    planned
33. 33
    Community ethics: the practitioners argue with themselves

    The internal debates on r/LocalLLaMA, HuggingFace discussions, and producer blogs.
    planned
34. 34
    Reverse-engineering abliteration from weights alone

    The current state of the "which method was used" question. What Hurtado and Messenger get right; where the classifier is unbuilt.
    ready
35. 35
    Cross-family comparison

    One table across every base family: how many variants, which methods dominate, what benchmarks fall.
    planned
36. 36
    Methodology appendix

    The Report Methodology document (v1.0, 2026-08-28) plus every session-specific override.
    ready
37. 37
    Sources appendix and bibliography

    Every primary source, cited exactly once, in one consolidated bibliography with archive.org backups where available.
    planned
38. 38
    Executive summary

    A short first-page summary written last, once the whole report has answered its own questions.
    planned