{"id":834669,"date":"2026-09-03T00:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T00:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/834669\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T00:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T00:32:11","slug":"while-ai-industry-frets-over-safeguards-one-company-is-building-a-model-that-doesnt-say-no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/834669\/","title":{"rendered":"While AI Industry Frets Over Safeguards, One Company Is Building a Model That ‘Doesn\u2019t Say No\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the wake of a string of major<\/a> AI hacks<\/a> that left Silicon Valley reeling, many tech companies have been focusing on how to make models better at refusing dangerous requests. Not all of them, though.<\/p>\n

Abliteration, a startup founded last year and based in Palo Alto, is loud and proud in its ambition to build what it describes on its website<\/a> as AI that \u201cdoesn\u2019t say no.\u201d In other words, its models are intentionally trained to handle the sorts of questionable tasks that other AI systems on the market would decline. The company launched its latest model on Monday, called\u2014in the awkward, multihyphenated style that\u2019s become conventional in the AI industry\u2014abliterated-model-large-v2. It\u2019s built upon GLM-5.3<\/a>, an open-weight model released last month by Chinese AI lab Z.ai, minus many of the usual safeguards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Abliteration wrote in a X post<\/a> about the new model: \u201cit does the offensive cyber, red teaming, and agent testing work other models refuse to do.\u201d But the startup isn\u2019t completely devoid of ethical red lines: a spokesperson told Gizmodo that Abliteration\u2019s models won\u2019t generate text describing child sexual abuse material or self-harm. (It can\u2019t generate images or video, either.)<\/p>\n

The company used a process called orthogonalization<\/a> to find and remove the mechanisms within GLM-5.3 that refuses user prompts. \u201cEverything else is left alone, so the reasoning, coding, and agentic strength of the base model carry over unchanged,\u201d according to its website.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It seems to be targeting a subgroup of developers who have been annoyed by what they regard as excessively touchy safeguards used by more mainstream developers, especially Anthropic. When that company released its Fable 5 model in June, many customers complained<\/a> it was refusing to respond to requests related to sensitive subjects like cybersecurity and biology, even if the requests themselves were totally benign.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s reckless\u2014to say the least\u2014to try to respond to the problem of excessive refusals by just doing away with safeguards altogether. Ejaaz Amahadeen, an investor and the host of a podcast about AI, called it<\/a> a \u201cnightmare scenario,\u201d and warned it \u201cwill spark a secondary \u2018grey market\u2019 for companies that seek to offer you the same model but effectively jail-broken.\u201d As bigger developers like OpenAI and Anthropic move to slow down some of their internal R&D following the heavily publicized cybersecurity fiascos caused by their AI systems, opportunistic players could, like Abliteration, move in to fill the gap.<\/p>\n

All of this is happening within a gaping regulatory void. Last month, the Trump administration introduced a framework through which the biggest AI developers in the U.S. would voluntarily hand new models over<\/a> to the federal government for a safety check prior to public release, though the details of what such a check would consist of\u2014if they\u2019ve been defined at all\u2014haven\u2019t been made public. All open source models are exempt. Aside from that, there are no policies at the federal level requiring developers to build particular safeguards into their models. Again and again, the administration has made it clear that its priorities lay chiefly in ensuring American dominance over China in the AI race, no matter the cost and despite the risks posed to the public by unconstrained AI.<\/p>\n

Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Abliteration\u2019s latest model release should be a wake-up call for U.S. policymakers. \u201cThe fact that U.S. companies are currently commercializing access to dangerous capabilities without any regulation, and U.S. technology is actively enabling the development and operation of these models, is alarming,\u201d he wrote in a X post<\/a> on Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the wake of a string of major AI hacks that left Silicon Valley reeling, many tech companies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":834670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,13208,181,507,74,644],"class_list":["post-834669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-safety","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-trump-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=834669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}