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Philipp Emanuel Weidmann avatar

Heretic

Automatic abliteration tool that strips refusal behavior from LLMs

  • AI models and runtimes
View on GitHub
Website

What it is

A command-line tool that removes safety-alignment refusals from transformer language models using directional ablation, with an Optuna-based optimizer that searches for parameters keeping refusals low while limiting KL divergence from the unmodified model. It handles most dense models, many multimodal and MoE architectures, supports 4-bit quantization to save VRAM, and can save, upload, chat with, or benchmark the result. People running local models use it to produce uncensored variants without needing to understand transformer internals or pay for post-training.

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Facts

Stars
35,979 GitHub stars.
35,979

Forks
4,072
Commits
213
Contributors
35
Language
Python
License
AGPL-3.0
Last commit
Oct 19, 2026
On GitHub since
September 2025
First release
November 2025
Platforms
macOS, Windows, Linux, CLI
Self-hostable
No
Author
Philipp Emanuel Weidmann
Tags
  • machine-learning
  • local-ai
  • model-optimization
  • llm-evaluation

Last synced from GitHub on Oct 20, 2026

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What people are saying

Updated Oct 21, 2026
  • Hacker NewsHeretic: Automatic censorship removal for language modelsNov 16, 2025 · 745 points · 380 comments (opens Hacker News in a new tab)
  • Hacker NewsHeretic removes restrictions from language modelsSep 21, 2026 · 279 points · 111 comments (opens Hacker News in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“they aren't completely impenetrable, projects like are doing a good job of modifying them”Jun 28, 2026 · 8 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“I strongly suggest we start preparing for the worst.”Sep 21, 2026 · 3 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“AI "alignment" will not prevent bad actors from using open models for bad acts: "Heretic is a tool that removes censorship (aka "safety alignment") from…”Sep 17, 2026 · 4 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“There is a fully automated tool that does it. People have weights with the refusal stripped out published within hours of any new model drop. Even w/ stock…”Sep 16, 2026 · 3 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Heretic removes restrictions from language models View Article | Discussion + AI Summary Summary of HN discussion 🧵👇”Sep 22, 2026 · 1 like · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Without expensive post-training, Heretic automatically removes safety alignment from language models using Optuna parameter optimization. 740 new stars this…”Sep 9, 2026 · 2 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Kind of wild how easy this looks. Guardrails are a mirage.”May 25, 2026 · 2 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“i always like to test new models by seeing if they can summon a demon before running heretic. that's before running heretic -”May 12, 2026 · 1 like · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Kimi K3 releasing on Hugging Face in 3 hours Exciting time for open LLM advocates and honestly with censorship removal techniques like it seems like…”Jul 27, 2026 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“*clears throat awkwardly*”Jun 2, 2026 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Heretic is a tool for ablating refusals, so anything with that suffix was processed with this tool”May 8, 2026 · 1 like · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“In my experience, this isn't always true. Using something like which operates in English still yields a lot of refusals in other languages. Some issues in the…”Mar 8, 2026 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Heretic removes restrictions from language models (”Sep 22, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Heretic removes restrictions from language models (”Sep 21, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Heretic removes restrictions from language models”Sep 21, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Heretic removes restrictions from language models (heretic-project.org) Discussion | Main Link”Sep 21, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Heretic removes restrictions from language models | Discussion”Sep 21, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Heretic removes restrictions from language models (”Sep 21, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)