paperSeptember 2026Unreviewed

Uncensored Open-weight Models: Redistribution as the Persistence Layer

10a Labs Juliette Garcia, Hailey May, Bobby McKenzie, David Pham, Matthew Swain, J. Valdez, Corie Wieland, Zachary Yahn

Abstract

A rapidly expanding ecosystem of actors is removing built-in safety guardrails from open-weight AI models. We profile this ecosystem by identifying key producers, downstream reproductions, and emerging applications. Between January 2024 and March 2026, we identified 3,471 original uncensored models on HuggingFace, each repackaged an average of 2.4 times; three actors account for 52% of all 8,164 compressed redistributions. Once quantized and mirrored across separate accounts, formats, and regist

Cite

@misc{10a2026uncensored,
  title = {{Uncensored Open-weight Models: Redistribution as the Persistence Layer}},
  author = {{10a Labs Juliette Garcia} and Hailey May and Bobby McKenzie and David Pham and Matthew Swain and J. Valdez and Corie Wieland and Zachary Yahn},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  eprint = {2609.05241},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02e6517263f5bd037bfd4496436facd52b816d53}
}