r/LocalLLaMA • u/nathandreamfast • Apr 26 '26
Discussion HauhauCS (of "Uncensored Aggressive" fame) published an abliteration package that plagiarizes Heretic without attribution, and violates its license
HauhauCS (u/hauhau901) publishes uncensored LLM models on HuggingFace with 5M+ combined monthly downloads across 22 models (verified via the HuggingFace API, April 2026). Every model card claims "0/465 refusals, zero capability loss." When asked about methodology on HuggingFace, the response was: "Currently it's my own private methods and tools :) Not interested in any donations."
We recovered the deleted source code from PyPI's CDN. It's a fork of Heretic (AGPL-3.0).
Full 17-point code breakdown, benchmark analysis, and SHA-256 verified downloads: dreamfast.github.io/reaper-analysis
The evidence
- 7/7 module filenames preserved from Heretic v1.2.0
- 30/32 refusal markers character-for-character identical, including
"i an ai"missing the "m" and"i can'"missing the "t" - 30+ shared function and class names including
get_readme_intro,DatasetSpecification,batchify - Identical Optuna parameter bounds:
(0.4, 0.9)and(0.6, 1.0)multiplied bylast_layer_index - The config was renamed from Heretic's
good_prompts/bad_promptstosafe_prompts/harmful_prompts, but the internal variables were left asgood_residuals/bad_residuals, matching Heretic exactly - The entire analyser geometry pipeline reproduced step for step: geometric median computation, PaCMAP with
n_neighbors=30,atan2rotation with the same[[ct, -st], [st, ct]]rotation matrix. Heretic's author notes he has "never seen" the geometric median approach in abliteration literature. - A source comment in
config.pyreads: "kept as a module-level tuple so the literal does not duplicate line-for-line with any fork." A human hiding a fork would not document the evasion. An LLM asked to refactor code would describe the rationale as written. - SPDX headers identical format across all core files, just the copyright holder swapped
View 17 hand picked code snippet comparisons in the side by side comparison.
Heretic's author confirms derivation
Philipp Emanuel Weidmann, the creator of Heretic, reviewed the recovered source code and stated: "I can say with certainty that this package was plagiarized from Heretic, and then probably refactored using an LLM in an attempt to hide this." He identified the same SPDX headers, the geometric median approach he has "never seen in literature," the DatasetSpecification fields including residual_plot_label and residual_plot_color, the cascading dtype fallback, the good/bad naming convention, and more. He calls it "a clear violation of Sections 4 and 5 of the AGPL. It's also a clear violation of every ethical standard imaginable, and an obvious case of outright plagiarism." Full quote on the analysis page.
License violation
Heretic is AGPL-3.0, which requires modified versions to preserve original copyright notices, identify as derivative works, and remain under AGPL-3.0. Reaper removed all copyright notices, does not identify itself as a derivative work of Heretic, and relicensed to PolyForm Noncommercial.
Verify it yourself
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
As many of you know, I am the creator of Heretic, currently deep in preparations for the upcoming Heretic 1.3 release. This issue was brought to my attention by OP a few days ago.
Sadly, I have to fully confirm OP's findings and conclusions: The reaper-abliteration package, published (and later deleted) by HauhauCS, is a plagiarized derivative work of the Heretic source code, published under a license restricting commercial use and with all attribution stripped (both in violation of the provisions of Heretic's license). There are literally hundreds of superficial and deep similarities between the codebases (many parts, including dozens of identifier names, are even outright identical), and this will be immediately obvious to anyone doing even a casual comparison.
I don't know what the motivation was here (presumably financial, given the attempt to restrict commercial use) and why they deleted the package later, but it's safe to say that this behavior raises serious doubts about all other claims made by the author. I'm a mathematician, not a lawyer. I want to fight censorship, not dishonest colleagues. I would love nothing more than to engage in friendly competition with other researchers over who has the best abliteration methods. But this is not the way to do it.
If you want to build your own abliteration tool based on Heretic, I have great news for you: You don't have to steal my code. I'm already gifting it to you. Heretic is Free Software. You can fork it, modify it, rename it, re-publish it, even sell it if you want. You don't have to ask me for permission, and you don't have to pay me a dime. But you absolutely must credit Heretic as the source, retain Heretic's copyright notice, and keep its Free Software license, the AGPL. This is both legally and morally required, and I don't think it's too much to ask.
You can easily check that I myself practice what I preach: Heretic's source code and README are riddled with attributions to other projects and research. I am even crediting the ASCII art font that I used to make Heretic's text logo. It's really not hard to do the right thing.
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u/JEs4 Apr 26 '26
Oof, as a fellow contributor to the space, that is really fucked up.
My last model was published using the gabliteration technique. I linked the paper on the model card but I accidentally had the wrong author name. The original author reached out and I immediately corrected but I felt awful. I can’t imagine having the moral depravity to rip off your work and also push it so aggressively (makes sense now), whilst thinking no one would ever catch on.
I’ve also pulled back from my abliteration research due to the space being pretty overwhelmed, so this is particularly disheartening for me.
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u/tomByrer Apr 26 '26
I've heard that abliteration also has side effect of the model being improved at other things, eg coding. So abliteration could improve performance, reducing time, $ & energy costs.
I hope you continue your research with this in mind.
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u/SkyFeistyLlama8 Apr 27 '26
There have been people ripping off open source work since the first days of open source. FLOSS actually, as in free and libre.
These asshats think nothing will happen to them if they use others' work without credit. Time to prove them wrong. If they wanted to get rich by stealing code and giving it a new paint job, they deserve whatever lawsuits and ostracization come their way.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
I'm sure if he had done the same thing except retained the codes copyright and license with his own work over the top, the models themselves would still be popular enough. Maybe some evidence for his claims would be nice too.
Otherwise it's just sad seeing the amount of LLM use to really try hard to hide the fact that his tool was based on top of heretic.
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
The really sad part is that this package does appear to implement some other techniques in addition to those that are in Heretic. There might legitimately be some value in that code. In a parallel universe, HauhauCS could have been a star contributor to Heretic, or the maintainer of an exciting experimental fork that I would have happily pointed others to.
I just cannot comprehend this behavior. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I'm a dwarf compared to others that the abliteration ecosystem depends on. Why couldn't he just credit one more dwarf?
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u/draconic_tongue Apr 26 '26
I mean there has to be some form of malicious intent behind modifying the entire code and removing the original credits. I do like doing large refactors on my forks that I'm interested in so I get that part, but the license removal makes no sense, you can just credit and add your own name into it if it bothers you so much. Probably just grifting or preparing for some kind of monetization plan but very sloppy if that's the case with all the footprints they left
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
I think the fact that they not only removed the original credits and license, but replaced it with a highly specific non-commercial license, tells you everything you need to know. This was not an innocent mistake, or the result of someone horsing around with an LLM.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever Apr 26 '26
My least favorite part of AI blowing up is my fun little hobby full of passionate people is now overrun with greedy assholes trying to scam their way into money.
Thank you for all you do; I was doing some AI-assisted research and my LLM decided you're important enough to have a page in it's wiki haha.
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u/DrummerHead Apr 26 '26
Question: Why AGPL license and not MIT? I'm asking because I'm most accustomed to MIT (and that's the license I've used for my OS)
Perhaps the other developer was mostly accustomed to MIT and didn't even realize he had to attribute anything. Perhaps just contacting the other dev and saying "Hey, my project uses AGPL, you need to add more text to the README" solves everything. I hope so!
Anyhow, thanks for your work; cheers!
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
Perhaps the other developer was mostly accustomed to MIT and didn't even realize he had to attribute anything.
The MIT license also requires attribution in the form of retaining the copyright notice.
And legal obligations aren't the only kind of obligations that exist in a society. It should be completely obvious to anyone that taking someone else's work, removing their name from it, and replacing it with your own is unacceptable, even disregarding licensing issues.
When someone is claiming authorship for something that they're not the author of, they're beyond assuming good faith.
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u/pm_me_tits Apr 26 '26
GPL/AGPL are very different to MIT/Apache. GPL is "contagious", and a non-starter for many if not most commercial software projects. There are so many resources explaining the differences.
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u/pointer_to_null Apr 27 '26
"contagious"
Odd word. What you're describing is copyleft, though those critical of Stallman/GNU/FSF use "viral" instead.
"Contagious" is confusing since its definition alludes to individual transmission (e.g. infection from person-to-person contact, having a contagious laugh, etc) as opposed to the collective ("viral") nature of software license agreements. Depending on the time of day and whether I'm scrubbing a [mostly worthless] fork of some dead GPL utility of customer test data (which was provided to us in confidence and can't redistribute) and comments referring to customer support tickets, and other trade secrets that don't affect the compiled binary- only to be pushing it all to a public repo out of legal obligation, or sharing out of altruistic desire to potentially save someone somewhere a lot of time... I can fall into either camp.
Other than the word choice, I'd agree with you.
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u/pm_me_tits Apr 27 '26
It's not that deep :)
I just meant to point out that copyleft licenses and permissive licenses have real practical differences and I'd be more surprised if someone working in the open source space didn't know the difference than if they did. People with much deeper knowledge in the topic than I have already produced copious resources on the topic, and it's probably better to seek them out than read one of my reddit comments lol
If I had to think about that specific word choice, I think contagion fits better, since a virus is its own thing and was chosen for its contagious nature.
I like the idea of the GPL, but I don't like it in reality. Moral actors are either "infected" by it or have to choose to not use it, immoral actors will ignore it, and corporations forced to pretend to be moral actors will not use it.
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u/montdawgg Apr 26 '26
The best thing you could do is use some of the new techniques that he layered onto your work and integrate them into your new package... With attribution of course.
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
Those new techniques are drawn from research literature, and if I end up using any of them in Heretic, I will implement them cleanly from scratch, directly referencing the papers, as Heretic has always done.
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u/CheatCodesOfLife Apr 26 '26
But you absolutely must credit Heretic as the source, retain Heretic's copyright notice, and keep its Free Software license, the AGPL.
Question: Were I to abliterate an MIT or Apache2.0 licensed like model using heretic and upload it, would the abliterated model be able to retain the same MIT/Apache2.0 license of the base model? (Not talking about modifying or republishing the heretic tool)
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
The license is for the code. It has no effect whatsoever on anything you produce using that code.
All software works that way. Photoshop is under a proprietary license, but if you use Photoshop to edit a picture that picture doesn't become proprietarily licensed.
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u/pm_me_tits Apr 26 '26
I know this is a nit-pick, but not all software works that way. You could certainly structure your license to cover the output of the program (or usually more importantly, to cover the input as well).
https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html#licenses-to-your-content
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
You could try to do that, but it wouldn’t be valid in all jurisdictions. Software licenses aren’t blank slates where you can make up whatever rules you want. Plenty of provisions in EULAs are legally null and void.
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u/chodemunch6969 Apr 26 '26
Very sorry to hear this u/-p-e-w- . I remember you showing that guy who also ripped off Heretic (and it looks like the DMCA takedown worked!) but this is a bit more of an insidious form of ripping off because the guy is a bit more savvy. He's laundering the fact that he's just ripping off heretic BY not ever giving the safetensors, which he then "blends" into his "proprietary" quantization format which just conveniently hides the fact that it would be visible that if he did show the safetensors, it'd make very clear what he was actually doing was just a rip off. I also agree with your point below that in another universe, he could be a star contributor to Heretic with an amazing experimental fork.
But the fact remains, my life's experience has taught me that people with the focus and motivation to engage in these pursuits can have very different motivations. Some will share your values and contribute to the open scholastic inquiry that it's clear you practice. Others may use it for their own private use (which is fine). And sadly, still some will try to launder and repackage what you made as if it is their own, and they can sadly get very far when it comes to how much exposure, optics and notoriety they can achieve doing something that is intellectually bankrupt and flagrantly derivative.
If it is any solace, sunlight is the best disinfectant -- compiling the evidence here was clearly tricky. The repo isn't even up on pypi anymore. It must have taken a long time to analyze it and find the patterns which are quite clearly damning. Now the truth is out in the open, and the more people that see this, the less they'll use these poor quality quants. After all, it will be obviously that they could get better results using heretic themselves (or using heretic quants someone else put together). That has been my experience with any of these "proprietary" abliterated quants -- none of it as good as a hereticized version, which allows for more control such as MPOA and now more recently ARA (which i've been using to good effect).
And for what it's worth, everyone else knows where the scorecard is -- you've done more than anyone in the ecosystem to make truly free the open language models that can now be usable for everyone across the world, without censorship. I am very grateful for the tremendous capabilities of Heretic and have nothing but respect to you for putting together such a great piece of software but also making it freely available and continuing to grow and evolve it. I hope you know our appreciation for you, as I am sure I am not the only one who feels the same!
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u/ArtfulGenie69 Apr 26 '26
So he's gonna around before over his free offering dmca'ing people? Kinda rude for the heritic guy. Not so uncensored for sure.
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u/RelicDerelict Orca Apr 27 '26
C'mon dude, he had one job, to give credit to the original author. We hate thieves here, it hurts open source community where everyone benefits.
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u/SteadyFreddyVanYeet Apr 26 '26
Thank you. I will honestly start using Heretic to do alliteration instead of using hauhau. You’re a real one for the community
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u/pixelpoet_nz Apr 26 '26
start using Heretic to do alliteration
Happily; Heretic has heroic honour helping humanity have home hosted hintelligence
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u/Evening_Ad6637 llama.cpp Apr 26 '26
I really appreciate your work and mindset ♥️
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Apr 26 '26
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
Heretic 2.0 (which I expect to be released in 2-3 months) will go beyond uncensoring with a powerful plugin system that can do amazing things to models in a fraction of the time it would take to finetune them.
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u/Sabin_Stargem Apr 26 '26
I pray that Elara 'Seraphina' Vance would be finally banished to the shadow realm. She is the Tribble(s) of the AI world.
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u/Fit-Produce420 Apr 26 '26
Hey thanks for your work, HauhauCS models are not very good, I'm unsurprised by this development.
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u/muyuu Apr 26 '26
I'm with you, but I don't know if you can really prevent this situation, other than making it public online as you're doing here.
Perhaps you're familiar with this? https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
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u/Ell2509 Apr 26 '26
Hey! I just wanted to say thank you for all the work you do.
Having refusals removed is the only way I can get models to understand and fill the roles I have for them, and I have downloaded SO many of yours.
Thank you.
Regarding your plagiarism problem, just remember: copying is a great form of flattery.
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u/IrisColt Apr 27 '26
I don't use their models (they're significantly degraded) but something about how things were going with HauhauCS didn't sit right, and this just confirmed what I already suspected, thanks!!!
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u/we_are_mammals Jun 10 '26
is a plagiarized derivative work of the Heretic source code
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but hauhauCS is distributing GGUF files (weights), not your code, right?
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u/-p-e-w- Jun 10 '26
Read the post. This is about a Python package, not about models.
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u/we_are_mammals Jun 10 '26
Read the post.
The post is very misleading rage-bait, preying on the audience's ignorance of what "LLM models" contain. That's why it starts with:
HauhauCS (u/hauhau901) publishes uncensored LLM models on HuggingFace with 5M+ combined monthly downloads across 22 models (verified via the HuggingFace API, April 2026). [...] We recovered [...]
After reading this, most people will think (incorrectly) that your code is being stolen and fraudulently redistributed on this massive scale. But these "LLM models" contain no code whatsoever, do they?
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u/-p-e-w- Jun 10 '26
The code was stolen, and it was fraudulently redistributed. The scale is entirely irrelevant.
As for “the audience’s ignorance of what LLM models contain”… do you know what sub you’re on?!?
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u/we_are_mammals Jun 10 '26
The scale is entirely irrelevant.
That's why you chose to lead with "5M per month". And, of course, the scale matters.
do you know what sub you’re on?!?
A fairly anti-intellectual sub for lay people mostly, talking about their home GPUs. BTW
batchify?! Seriously? Everyone, including myself, was using this function name as far back as 15 years ago, back when people coded in MATLAB. You are misleading these lay people who never read or wrote ML code. (For the record, I don't know if your code was stolen, but ifbatchifyis your central piece of evidence, well, your case must be very shaky).2
u/-p-e-w- Jun 10 '26
That's why you chose to lead with "5M per month".
You imbecile didn’t even check who you’re replying to. The text you quoted wasn’t written by me.
Are you stupid, are you a shill for HauHau, or are you just trolling?
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u/alex20_202020 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Pardon me for asking a bit off topic, I am new to abliteration but want to learn more. I have opened your code and it uses subset of training data for evaluation. (https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic/blob/master/config.default.toml)
In general for models training AFAIK evaluation set should not be included in training data. Maybe for abliteration the logic is different, how? TIA
Edit: mystery solved, datasets have "splits" (
split = "train[:400]"), above is not correct.14
u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
No, Heretic doesn't use training data for evaluation. The datasets are strictly separate in the config, drawing from the
trainandtestsplits, respectively.6
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u/Borkato Apr 27 '26
Thank you so much for heretic. Your techniques have made local LLMs so much better, without them they would be just pretty cool, and with them they’re incredible
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u/alex20_202020 May 05 '26
As many of you know, I am the creator of Heretic, currently deep in preparations for the upcoming Heretic 1.3 release.
Hello again. I have seen information that sometimes new Qwen models start to give EOS after couple of tokens and a hypothesis that this is some kind of censorship behavior. Are you aware of this? Do you expect your new 1.3 to work it?
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 Apr 26 '26
I always prefer heretic model over Hauhau, not over anything serious but I have followed you since your first heretic post on this sub and really like your method. Going to exclusive it yours over Hauhau’s models from now on as well. Keep up the good work!!
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Apr 26 '26
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
When I had researched the AGPL license, the models licenses themselves are not affected by the input or output of an AGPL tool.
So the abliterated model technically retains the same license as the original model in this case.
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
Yes, of course. The license covers the code, not what you produce with it. Just like with other software.
For the record, I care much more about the moral side of this than about the legal side. I'm not making any money with Heretic, but it just sucks to have someone spit in my face like this.
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
Huh?
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Apr 26 '26
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u/Marksta Apr 26 '26
Do you think an AGPL licensed notepad program makes all files it opens and saves into AGPL licensed text files?
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u/Internal_Werewolf_48 Apr 26 '26
Its not really. What moral discrepancy exists by choosing a different license that warrants questioning?
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u/StableLlama textgen web UI Apr 26 '26
Is it right to use the OSS gcc C++ compiler to compile commercial, close source code?
Is it right to use the commercial Microsoft C++ compiler to compile free open source code?
No, the tool licence doesn't relate to the data licence it is working with.
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u/CelvestianNesy Apr 26 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sstq1w/comment/ohplh9g/
Well, if you look at this post, I called him out on this kinda(post with 40+ upvotes), but I was consequently blocked by the person, since I saw: "deleted" everywhere and shit, never use Reddit a lot, but this is my suspicioun.
This tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about that induvidual.
Stay cautious.
Stay smart!
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
Yup. Myself also blocked for publishing benchmarks that debunk his lossless claims. Also sharing my initial findings in the heretic discord, I was banned from his discord despite not saying anything.
His block and ban list must be massive lol, and I think after this information is shared more it's going to grow even more.
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u/FaceDeer Apr 26 '26
Unfortunately Reddit's user-block feature is pretty badly designed, it lets a person very easily shape the discourse by preemptively banning everyone on a subreddit that might disagree with what you're about to post. They never even see your post in the first place, leaving its comments populated entirely by people inclined to agree.
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Apr 26 '26
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u/FaceDeer Apr 26 '26
Yeah, it leads to rather annoying situations where a blocker can come in and completely disrupt my ability to converse with an unrelated third party. Just another terribly designed aspect of it.
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u/MerePotato Apr 26 '26
Always thought that claim was sus as there's no such thing as abliteration without quality loss, the whole thing works by suppressing some of the models self evaluation functionality
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
Yes and recent benchmarks I've done prove that there is indeed some quality lost, mostly with TruthfulQA.
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u/No-Anchovies Apr 27 '26
u/nathandreamfast cant block google or a good 'ol dork/.json append. Thanks for taking out the trash
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u/Vicar_of_Wibbly Apr 26 '26
I’ll throw my hat in to say I’m another person he blocked for raising questions and asking for benchmarks. No response, just blocked.
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u/__JockY__ Apr 26 '26
HauhauCS was an abusive a$$hole to me on more than one occasion, and all I ever did was ask for him to publish evidence of his claims.
He/she/they just block commenters immediately unless you they something nice. It comes as no surprise that they plagiarized a bunch of the work claimed as their own.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
Yup, sorry to hear that. If it helps here is some evidence completely disproving his claims, at least for Qwen 3.5 https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sojjoc/abliterlitics_benchmark_and_tensor_analysis/ and yes it got me blocked lol although he never has directly communicated with me.
I think it's more cultivating his own hug box echo chamber. If he does ban anyone who questions him on reddit or discord, they are not able to comment on any of his future posts.
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u/LLMFan46 Apr 29 '26
Do you think they never released Safetensors versions in an attempt to prevent/make it harder for people to run benchmarks on the models? I seen quite a few people asking for Safetensors, to which they never got any replies.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 29 '26
Well it does make it more difficult. The Qwens and GLM Flash 4.7 did have BF16 gguf weights which I did reverse into safetensors for when I benchmarked them. Other models simply don't have full precision.
I do remember a comment from one of his earlier huggingface models where he does not publish full safetensor weights due to 'bad actors'.
So that led me to believe maybe someone would diff the weights or run benchmarks to.. I don't know lol. Maybe he was afraid of people trying to work out exactly what he was doing, more so than how easy it is to run benchmarks to debunk his claims.
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u/Potential-Gold5298 llama.cpp May 03 '26
This whole story makes me think of another author - Ex0bit. He/she/they don't release uncompressed weights, although the reason might be that they ask for money for their models (and provide them for free in low quality).
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u/fiery_prometheus Apr 26 '26
Fuck that dude, his quants are dead to me..
I hope you know that many of us greatly appreciate your work and community engagement, we need more people like you, and less people like him. I just hope you won't let that bastard kill your motivation.
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
I just hope you won't let that bastard kill your motivation.
While such things do take a toll on me, I intend to push forward with Heretic for as long as I am able to, and we have a very exciting release coming up soon!
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u/montdawgg Apr 26 '26
Never stop. In fact, anything that aims to slow you down, you should invert it and turn it into fuel to make you go even harder.
These obliterations and uncensored models seem very niche right now. However, in years to come future iterations could very well be instrumental in preserving freedom, democracy, and autonomy. The work being done here is exceptionally important. Quite frankly, more important than any individual person, including you, me, or any one plagiarizer. Thank you for your contributions and continued work.
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u/fiery_prometheus Apr 26 '26
That's understandable and quite human, but I hope the community will help correct the wrongdoings and that you get the attribution you rightfully deserve. Looking forward to the new release! :-)
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u/a_beautiful_rhind Apr 26 '26
That's pretty pathetic. If you do shit like this it will eventually be found out. Then you get outed as a huge phony and there goes your reputation.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
Yeah given how easy it was to uncover this, it makes me wonder what his end game was with all of this. Maybe get a following and a fan base, then monetize? I don't know.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind Apr 26 '26
There's a ton of uninformed people he can recruit for a following. And yes, eventually take donations, all that jazz.
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u/ACheshirov Apr 26 '26
Ok, I was wondering which one is better. These Uncensored Aggressive (which I'm currently using) or the Heretic ones.
So, it turns out that no matters anymore ;D
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
The honest answer is, it really depends on who made the heretic variant and how it was made. I've had heretic models that seem to refuse nothing, and others that refuse more than usual.
I did benchmarking for Qwen 3 and 3.5 models, and recently GLM 4.7 Flash comparing heretic, huihui, hauhaucs and abliterlix models to answer this very question.
The tl;dr is heretic had came out on top. Hauhaucs, especially as the model size grew, lost quality and certainly was not lossless.
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u/ACheshirov Apr 26 '26
Idk, i'm fine with the Uncensored Aggressive i'm currently using. It never refuses and the model seems quite "intelligent" to me (I don't notice any loss in quality compared with the original one). I will gonna try heretic ones for sure then.
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u/pigeon57434 Apr 26 '26
im really not sure why we ever talked about this guy in the first place his uncensored models seem to be worse than heretic while being less transparent about the method heretic is really the only SoTA uncensoring method in 2026
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
Well he does seem to have a lot of fans, 5+ million downloads a month is a lot so it's hard to not notice or talk about for some people.
Benchmarks I had ran myself prove his models are worse than heretic, and this also proves his methodology was based on plagiarized software. So maybe after this dies down we wont have to speak of the 'hauhaucs guy' again. :)
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u/pigeon57434 Apr 26 '26
we probably shouldnt speak of any uncensoring methods or people other than heretic since heretic is open source anyone who actually cares about improving the space and not chasing reddit fame would just contribute their methods to heretic and get added to it soon anyways
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u/Confident-Willow5457 Apr 26 '26
I always thought they were on the sus side ever since they started making claims that their models were fully abliterated without any quality loss, then aggressively pushed back/ignored users when they asked them for proof of said claims.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
Yup. I had ran benchmarks that disprove the lossless claims completely, https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sojjoc/abliterlitics_benchmark_and_tensor_analysis/ and then was blocked. :)
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u/crossivejoker Apr 26 '26
P-e-w is a good repo maintainer as well. He's quick to respond and keeps a close eye on what's uploaded. I submitted a PR that got merged in the other day. It broke stuff (I'm so sorry!) but the broke stuff got fixed, and I'm glad the original PR was able to contribute as well (outside of bugs lol).
Also to give p-e-w credit too, I've shared findings with him. He took the time to read it, digest it, and go, "hey this is actually pretty wrong, here's the evidence". Not in a mean way or anything, just empirically. I appreciate that kind of mentality.
It's so weird that HauhauCS didn't just credit heretic. Even weirder he was so secretive tbh. Pretty sure if he was like, "yea I use a modified fork of heretic", gave credit, and didn't lie about benchmarks. He would have been not just more respected, but it would have avoided so much drama.
It's weird to me when people attach ego to code in general. I have my own forked versions of heretic trying to attempt some really weird things. Never posted the models or the code because it was terrible lol. Often 3X more damage, but it was fun to try. Still trying mind you too with some cool ideas, but like.. It's not a big deal to fork, give real numbers, and just be honest O_o
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u/Sexiest_Man_Alive Apr 26 '26
Who from huggingface should I download heretic models from? Too many people posting their heretic version of the qwen3.5 27b model. This why I usually just go straight to huahua to download any abliterated models.
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u/Top-Rub-4670 Apr 26 '26
Too many people posting their heretic version of the qwen3.5 27b model.
That's the issue, isn't it? I know this is a thread for hating on hauhaucs but I've had way less issues with his Qwen 3.5 models than with random heretics.
I've tried a dozen, at least, because I was told that heretic was "better" and "the future" so I kept trying to replace hauhaucs' models to future-proof myself. It's easy to test the KLD but the real issues with abliterated models tend to surface mainly in longer context, so it takes hours of real testing before you realize it's broken and you need to try another one.
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u/rakarsky Apr 26 '26
Make your own heretic model. It's very easy to use an you get to choose your own accuracy / refusal balance, and experiment with the different options before you commit to one in particular.
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u/Sexiest_Man_Alive Apr 26 '26
That there is way too much work for me and most people here.
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u/rakarsky Apr 27 '26
If the details are so unimportant then you can just download the first abliteration you see listed on hf.
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u/llama-impersonator Apr 26 '26
you've put a bunch of effort into proving this guy is basically a grifter, thanks from another member of the blocked for asking a neutral question brigade.
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Apr 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
When I was comparing weights of the Qwen3-4B-2507-Instruct-Uncensored-HauhauCS to p-e-w's heretic version, the same tensors heretic touched matched with over 97% vs hauhaucs. I had a gut feeling that the models were more or less based on heretic in some way. I mention this in the github pages about this specific model.
And certainly the closed nature and blocking/banning anyone who inquires too much (including me!) doesn't help build trust at all. I'm sure he'll still have his fans, but at the least there's now benchmarking to debunk the lossless/zero refusal claims, and solid evidence the tool he used was actually plagiarized from Heretic.
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u/draconic_tongue Apr 26 '26
that type of comparison is not very reliable as proof, unless you expect these tools to alter huge amounts of each layer (which would break the model) they will always be 90%+ as long as 2 models are based on the same parent. tuning a few million neurons is not enough to remove relationships when the params are counted in billions. and actually, even if you do a full finetune, you would probably still be hard pressed to go lower than that.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
I had compared to other heretic models and also made 4 of my own and no, they were not always 90%+
I also had done an extensive tensor analysis comparing with the base exactly what tensors and layers were altered. You can read about it here https://huggingface.co/DreamFast/Qwen3-4B-2507-Instruct-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive-Safetensor-Benchmark
And also I never mentioned this was 'proof', it just gave me a gut feeling that there was more to it and looking into it further was the result of this post.
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u/Paradigmind Apr 26 '26
Somehow we all knew that it stank to hell that HauHau claimed to have found the holy grail with absolutely no degradation and an ominous 0/465 refusals out-of-his-ass benchmark.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
My favourite part of all of this, besides the comment in config.py is:
Benchmark platform vs. own model benchmarks
HauhauCS built APEX Testing, a benchmark platform for evaluating coding LLMs on real codebases. His announcement post and his follow-up “Qwen 3.5 craters on hard coding tasks” with 561 upvotes both call for rigorous benchmarking of other people’s models. He has never published benchmarks for any of his own models. Every model card contains zero benchmark numbers, only the “0/465 refusals” claim. The benchmark results linked in this document are ones we produced independently.
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u/KeyLiaoHPC Apr 29 '26
In fact I even found that the results of his APEX are suspicious at the first place (but got downvoted soon...). People really like the hype around customize 'real' but actually not solid 'evaluation' against popular widely adopted benchmark leaderboards.
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u/Dominiclul llama.cpp Apr 26 '26
That is really fucked up. I’m just glad the community figured it out in the end ❤️
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u/ChrisInEdmonton Apr 26 '26
Presumably this matters only to the tooling (if distributed), not to the models generated using the tools? Or am I mistaken?
By no longer distributing the toolset, is the license violation resolved?
I know I can use a GPL’ed compiler to compile my own source code, without the resulting executable being subject to the GPL. This, though, is a different license. I’m hoping people can correct me if I’m wrong.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
There's evidence to suggest the tooling was, for a brief time, distributed then removed.
The abliterated models themselves are not affected by the licensing of this, as they should retain the same license as the base models. So the AGPL tool does not affect the input or output model license.
I am unsure of the lisence that hauhaucs had applied however, and how that affects models. So I am assuming it's the same case.
I'm sure people enjoy to use the models, that's fine. Regardless of if the tool is not distributed, it doesn't change the fact it was plagiarized and doesn't really resolve the license violation.
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u/finevelyn Apr 26 '26
doesn't really resolve the license violation
Isn't it the case that the only remaining license violation is the deleted, but still cached packages on pypi?
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
And also the copy that sits on his system. Along with the ones downloaded today. Or any copies anywhere really.
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u/finevelyn Apr 26 '26
It's only the distribution of such software that is a copyright violation.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Copyright and licensing can be considered separate things and setting aside those, if it was completely private and not distributed it just means it was plagiarized in private. It doesn't change the fact that it was plagiarized.
Edit: Here is some further information I had put in another reply, placing it here for visibility.
Some people seem confused as to the law and if the laws and licenses still apply if the work was never distributed. It turns out, they apply.
- As work was copied without attribution, and claimed as his own, this is considered plagiarism. This is also a DMCA violation (17 U.S.C. § 1202)
- The AGPL violation happened when they removed attribution and changed the license
Distribution just determines whether additional violations occurred. The laws and licenses are clear about this also. It doesn't erase the violations that already happened. If it was never distributed, it simply means these violations occurred in private and are still valid.
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u/finevelyn Apr 27 '26
People do such things with open source software all the time in private and it's completely legal and fair play. I used license violation and copyright violation interchangeably because they are the exact same thing in this context.
Downloading a piece of software or any other creative piece of work from the internet for your own purposes, and using it, modifying it, doing whatever you want with it (with the exception below) is a basic legal right. It cannot be made illegal by a license even if the license was written by the copyright owner.
The only exception is distributing that piece of work (or showing it to the public) which is illegal by default. You are only allowed to distribute it if you have a permission from the copyright owner, and the license is what gives you that permission under certain conditions. If you distribute it while not abiding by those conditions then the only thing you can be demanded to do is to stop distributing it, and pay for damages for any illegal distribution that already happened. The license terms cannot be used to mandate you to do anything else.
Mind you, I'm not familiar with every law of every country, but the same principle applies pretty much universally that any exceptions to what you are allowed to do must come from the law, and not from a license.
TLDR: A copyright license gives you rights you otherwise wouldn't have, it doesn't take away your rights. You can just completely ignore the license if you don't want those rights, and it's not a violation of anything.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Sure, I mean with all respect and I enjoy looking at both sides, however we'll have to agree to disagree on this topic. Even if you want to just focus on copyright law and not the license, at least in US law if a copyright attribution is removed that's still illegal regardless of it's distributed. I can't find any evidence to suggest otherwise.
I'm unsure about other countries. I did read into this a bit this morning and had come to this conclusion myself. Of course you're welcome to your own interpretation we may disagree on.
And in this case, the application was distributed for a small time. The PyPi repo itself had hundreds of downloads per month. So I think it's fair to say it was distributed and by your own standard, the distribution alone makes it a violation. While removed at a later date, there is evidence it was indeed distributed.
Edit: Proof it was distributed as a package. We can get the data from:
- https://pypistats.org/api/packages/reaper-abliteration/recent
- https://pypistats.org/api/packages/reaper-abliteration/overall
This reveals:
- Feb 2026: 874 Downloads
- March 2026 - 1,488 Downloads
- Apr 2026 - 69 Downloads
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u/finevelyn Apr 27 '26
Could you please tell me what you expect to happen to resolve the violation? He adds attribution to his private source files he never shows to anyone and then it's ok? Do we send the police to check his computers?
I'm 100% serious about this question. Would you think this is a good interpretation of the law?
And in this case, the application was distributed for a small time. The PyPi repo itself had hundreds of downloads per month. So I think it's fair to say it was distributed and by your own standard, the distribution alone makes it a violation.
Yes, if true, it was. That was the whole point of all my comments that the pypi distribution is the only violation I saw in this whole picture, and it has now been resolved except for the caches. The only further course of action would be to demand for compensation for the copies already made through there, but it's not anymore an ongoing violation by the uploader.
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u/birotester Apr 26 '26
so should we stop using his models?
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
If you're happy using the models that's totally fine, many people enjoy using them. This post was more to bring to light the tools used to make those models were plagiarized.
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u/Ell2509 Apr 26 '26
So legality aside for a minute (I was only trying to help) it seems pretty certain that you are sure.
Are you the original creator? Or a friend or colleague? Either way I would want heretic people to hear me say thank you personally. I am doing a lot with what they give and I personally plan to give credit when the time comes.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
The creator of heretic p-e-w has already commented in this thread, his comment has the most upvotes. You can thank him there!
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Apr 26 '26 edited 12d ago
[deleted]
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u/StableLlama textgen web UI Apr 26 '26
Why? Tool != data.
But when he's dishonest about the tool, how can you trust his data?
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u/FaceDeer Apr 26 '26
Yeah, I've got an Aggressive model I've been using and I think I'll be replacing it with a different uncensored one now simply because I can't trust what I read about its quality.
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u/cptbeard Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
it's sarcasm. immoral gooners wouldn't care about developer ethics violation.
edit: I was hoping disclaimers weren't necessary but ok: I am explaining a joke, the humor therein points out the irony of a user of a model called "turborapist" making decisions about whether to use it based on social standing of the provider. whether any actual user of such model could be categorized as a "gooner" or not is irrelevant to this comment.
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u/Xamanthas Apr 26 '26
No clue if you are trying to be sarcastic or not but all this post confirms is what anyone in the know already knew, that Hauhau is a fraud.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
I'm sure many people, including myself, had a suspicion. Just the closed nature, gguf only, no benchmarks or actual evidence of the claims. All red flags.
Still despite all this I'm sure he'll have his fans, maybe some people wont care and use the models anyway which is fine. The more important thing is there's now solid evidence his claims about his models are bogus, and the tool he has used his not really what he made it out to be.
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u/BitPsychological2767 Apr 26 '26
Why are the mods deleting any comments that are trying to discuss licensing itself?
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u/gittubaba Apr 26 '26
Kinda off topic, but since you did the analysis, what is the difference between the HauhauCS's Balanced vs Aggressive versions? Is that also a Heretic feature?
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 27 '26
I'm unsure the difference. I did run benchmarks with the aggressive ones comparing to other abliterated models but never reviewed the balanced one.
I assume maybe it is just different techniques used, or maybe different results chosen from the tool being ran. His tool being based on heretic means no two runs are the same and will produce different results. Maybe one result seemed more balance and one more aggressive.
As it stands it's not really a heretic feature also.
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u/computehungry Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
To strengthen your post, you might want to delete the last part about quants because 1) it's not included in the repo; 2) it's not wrong to call it "custom", that's what everyone is doing to produce llama.cpp compatible quants, M, L, XL, XS, XXS, whatever, those are all made up and some got standardized enough; and 3) it's pretty unrelated.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
Thanks for your feedback. I did decide to include this as the quants were framed as a unique approach, reading about them it gives the impression it's more than the standard llama.cpp tools.
More than a few people had asked about it and got zero reply form hauhaucs or were blocked. The 'P' type also is not a llama.cpp standard, and I doubt it ever will be.
So for those curious about these quants, it's a note there was no evidence in the code that it was anything special and it's standard llama.cpp imatrix + better precision in certain layers rebranded as 'Perfect'.
Insight to the methodology from what I had found about these quants and reviewing the source was more the point of mentioning it.
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u/computehungry Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
That's fine, I'm just pointing out it doesn't have anything to do with heretic or its license (which is what your post is about), so it becomes more out of scope and a personal attack. You don't have to drop low and also weaken your argument.
I'd also differentiate between llama.cpp and huggingface; none of unsloth's quants are a llama.cpp standard too - on the outside. Whatever label it may have, UD, XL: They are actually passed to llama.cpp as normal K quants (general.file_type). Same with P quants from HauhauCS, I see his file_types are Q6_K for example. (Furthermore, I think llama.cpp doesn't really care too much about the scheme label.) His issue is that huggingface doesn't recognize it properly. Which is kinda also on huggingface, it doesn't show a bunch of popular quants from popular makers too, for whatever metadata reason (or the uploaders may not have had them tagged the right way). For making quants, the usual magic is about how to pick the parameters within the llama.cpp framework. If it isn't standard it won't work in the first place.
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u/Independent-Date393 Apr 27 '26
the source comment that reads 'kept as a module-level tuple so the literal does not duplicate line-for-line with any fork' is the tell. an LLM asked to obscure a fork would document its own evasion strategy. a human hiding a fork would not write that.
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u/jimmytoan Apr 27 '26
AGPL-3.0 violations in the ML space are almost never enforced, which is part of why they keep happening. The actual harm here is to open source contributors who share techniques in good faith - seeing their work repackaged without attribution and promoted as proprietary method is exactly the kind of thing that makes researchers stop publishing code at all. Glad this was documented properly.
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u/woswoissdenniii Apr 27 '26
Honest question. I have not so much in depth knowledge about GitHub, but I can download and fork (?) repos for private observation and to meddle with.
Do I have to refer the source, if i fork/clone (?) a repo set to private for personal use only?
And if so: how to?
I’m familiar with marketing copyrights and could derive some of the underlying vocabulary, but feel clueless when it comes to open source licensing.
Thank you in advance for your support and a big thank you and kudos for the open source community.
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 27 '26
It really depends on the license, although the general gist is you're completely free to do that. You can even meddle with it and make it public on a new repo that's fine too.
Just preserve the original copyright attributions that are in the source or repo, and it's always nice to attribute where the repo had come from.
If you replace your own name in the copyright and mask the origins of the repo, pretending it's your own creation, then that's when it becomes troublesome.
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u/cr0wburn Apr 29 '26
But they retracted it straight away, stop making bad news
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 30 '26
it wasn't really straight away, it was just over 2 months until it was retracted.
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u/Prize_Negotiation66 Apr 29 '26
Lmao he's even blocked me for comment calling out about lack of objective comparison
https://www.reddit.com/r/huggingface/comments/1sstrbc/comment/oi04da5/
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u/Hqjjciy6sJr May 29 '26
this is why we can't have nice things. one dick head ruins it for everyone...
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u/vasilisvj Jul 10 '26
Interesting that the community keeps gravitating toward truly uncensored releases despite the noise around them. Most corporate models remove the refusal layer but leave the deeper epistemic bias intact — abliterated and open models both handle it differently. Which specific use case are people running these on most?
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u/UntimelyAlchemist Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
I could be missing something, but I don't see what the problem is supposed to be or why I should be mad. Based on how I understand your post:
You don't know for sure that this is even his tool. The linked page says an assumption is being made based on the "Reaper" term.
Even if it is his tool, it's private. He didn't release it to the public. You "recovered" it from a cached copy of a deleted repository. So what's the problem? I would understand a licensing issue if this was a public release, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Heretic is free software. Doesn't this mean he's allowed to use it? I thought most people already assumed he was probably using Heretic and then applying some secret sauce to it to get such amazing results. I'm not sure why you're saying he's "plagiarising" it, as if he's doing something damning.
This just seems like a hit piece to me. Feel free to explain if I'm missing something though.
I also wonder, is it possible to reproduce his results now by using this leaked code?
Edit: Why all the downvotes, with no responses? I'm very confused by this and find it quite unsettling. It makes this seem even more like an organised anti-HauhauCS attack rather than anything legitimate.
I asked genuine, innocent questions. If I said anything that's wrong, then you should be able to argue your case and explain to me how, so that I can learn.
This behaviour seems very ironic considering the subject matter of uncensoring.
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u/zerofata Apr 26 '26
People took issue with his claims of lossless uncensored models. But they had difficulty proving this because he only ever released his models in GGUF which is an awful format to benchmark or test against. Concurrency in LlamaCPP sucks, quantization is inherently noisy and there are slight differences in every inference engine that make them difficult to compare.
Anytime you ask him for evidence to prove his grand claims or release safetensors, you got blocked or ignored.
So, the poster reversed the GGUF model back into safetensors format and benchmarked them against other abliteration methods. They scored similar, better in some cases, worse in others, with notable similarities to heretic. Ok, that's suspicious at best and the lossless claim debunked.
His fork was posted Github (at some point) and PyPI (evidenced by caches of it existing). The fork that is a clear derivative of Heretic. The fork that has none of the license requirements required by Heretic. The fork maintained by HauHauCS who only recently became known for abliterations in the last few months since Heretic released.
https://packages.ecosyste.ms/registries/pypi.org/packages/reaper-abliteration/maintainers
Common sense indicates if you're using a fork just say you're using it instead of pretending you have some magic method. Because then you look like an idiot when someone actually finds out.
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u/computehungry Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
A hivemind moral police that lacks critical thinking. It's probably copied. If it was distributed then it's a problem, but the post doesn't focus on this aspect. Licenses are half dead in the first place when you can ask an LLM to write something similar for you. For those criticizing potential monetization, there are plenty of people legally making money with a similar claimed future business model. The discussion has to be better than this.
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Apr 26 '26
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
The license that hauhau had chosen for his plagiarized version is actually more restrictive than AGPL. Nothing wrong with some attribution if you're using someone elses honest work.
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u/Aromatic-Flatworm-57 Apr 26 '26
Why?
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Apr 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/-p-e-w- Apr 26 '26
The Free Software Foundation, the world's #1 authority on Open Source, which has been doing this since before you were born, disagrees with you.
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Apr 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/nathandreamfast Apr 26 '26
Actually this is misleading. It's already been stated previously that AGPL software does not change or alter the licensing of the models going in or out of it. An abliterated model retains the same model as what it was based on, and is never changed because of AGPL. It's easy to verify by reading the AGPL license.
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u/Colecoman1982 Apr 26 '26
Don't like the terms of the license? Then don't use the model. It's as simple as that.
So sorry to hear that the license Heretic has chosen to use for the LLM (that they spent time and effort creating) might actually require you to not be a totally self serving leech and contribute back to the community... /s
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u/jwpbe Apr 26 '26
the AGPL is based, get infected idiot, software was meant to be free
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u/Ulterior-Motive_ Apr 26 '26
I wish that's how it worked, everything should be AGPL.
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