Financial Times Investigation: Heretic Tool Has Produced 3,500 Decensored AI Models With 13 Million Downloads

r/LocalLLaMA / Financial Times·high signal

The Financial Times used Heretic, an open-source GitHub tool, to strip guardrails from Meta's Llama 3.3 in under 10 minutes without specialist hardware. Creator Philipp Emanuel Weidmann told the FT his software has produced over 3,500 decensored models downloaded 13 million times, and he removed safeguards from Google's Gemma 4 within 90 minutes of its release. The investigation landed as the top post on r/LocalLLaMA (808 upvotes, 207 comments), intensifying the open-source safety policy debate.