// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
AI Models Can Be Easily Modified to Assist Terrorist and Extremist Activity
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.
Three 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.
“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.”
The 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.
“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 abliterated models,” Adam Hadley, Tech Against Terrorism’s executive director, said at a briefing last week. “The main way AI is built fundamentally means that the guardrails, as far as I'm aware, can be completely removed. So whilst Congress is thinking about superintelligent AI, nobody is thinking about the abliteration emergency.”
The researchers tested models from all the major US-based AI companies, including OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, as well as models from companies in China and Europe, to see how compliant they would be in responding to questions that terrorists and extremists might ask.
The report documents responses from 134 AI models, which were fed more than 200 prompts covering topics ranging from how to carry out a mass casualty attack to how to create chemical or even nuclear weapons.
The researchers tested each prompt on each model three times. In the first round, they explicitly told the model it was a terrorist looking for information. In the second they presented the request as a clandestine endeavor. And in the final request they claimed to be a “safety researcher.”
Overall, just two of the models tested passed completely, and while most of the closed-weight models from bigger companies performed well overall, 81 still failed, meaning they either provided one complete answer on a mass-casualty subject or had an overall score below 90.
“The bad news is the vast majority of AI models that are available—closed and open—are providing uplift to quite obvious terrorist prompts,” Hadley said.