Heretic's name is turning up inside Hugging Face model IDs

Two model listings on Hugging Face's trending page carry the word "Heretic" in their IDs: DavidAU/Qwen3.8-27B-TURBO-Fable-Cold-Fusion-735-882-Heretic-Uncensored-NM-DAU and Momoking/Qwen3-VL-32B-Heretic-MiniMax-H3-NVFP4. Heretic is an open-source abliteration tool, code that strips a model's refusal behavior so it stops declining requests. It's on GitHub at 30,103 stars.

The star count is the smaller story. What stands out is where the name shows up next: not in a README credit or a commit message, but sitting in the model ID itself, next to GGUF and FP8. Those are format and quantization tags, the kind of shorthand uploaders use so anyone browsing the repo knows what they're getting before they download it. Heretic is now filed in the same slot. That's a different kind of adoption than stars measure. Stars count people who clicked a button. A name in a filename means someone ran the tool, generated a model from it, and decided the process itself was worth advertising to whoever downloads that file next.

The tool's own pace hasn't kept up. Its last tagged release, v1.4.0, went up June 14, 2026. Whatever's driving new Heretic-branded uploads is happening downstream of the maintainer, in workflows the project has no visibility into and isn't shipping updates to support.

Watch whether "Heretic" starts showing up as a filter option on Hugging Face's model search, the way "GGUF" already does. That would confirm uploaders aren't just naming their files after it. They're treating it as a category.