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.
\n\nThree 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.
\n\n“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.”
\n\nThe 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.
\n\n“I think what we find slightly preposterous is that there's so much debate about existential risk, [but] there's very little public discussion about…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/