Heretic

Overview

Heretic is an open-weights project released under AGPL-3.0 license. On April 27, 2026, the community discovered that HauhauCS’s widely-distributed “private” abliteration (jailbreak) toolchain had plagiarized Heretic’s entire codebase without attribution or license compliance, despite claiming to be proprietary methodology.

Timeline

• 2026-04-27-AI-Digest — Heretic becomes the centerpiece of a major open-weights supply-chain license-violation incident. A forensic r/LocalLLaMA teardown documents that HauhauCS copied Heretic’s entire abliteration toolchain: 7/7 module filenames preserved verbatim, 30/32 refusal markers character-for-character identical (including misspellings), 30+ shared function and class names, and identical Optuna parameter bounds — recovered from a deleted PyPI release. The plagiarized code is distributed across HauhauCS’s 5M+ combined monthly-download portfolio of “uncensored” models, all marketed with “0/465 refusals” guarantees despite running on stripped-license AGPL-3.0 code. The incident establishes that supply-chain provenance verification is now an explicit risk, not a theoretical one.

Key Developments

1. AGPL-3.0 License Violation: Heretic’s AGPL-3.0 license requires derivative works to release source code and maintain the same license. HauhauCS’s plagiarism and license-stripping violates the core constraint of the license and affects 5M+ monthly-download package family.

2. Forensic Provenance: The teardown demonstrates that character-for-character code duplication, identical variable names, and identical hyperparameters are forensically traceable at scale — making the violation publicly verifiable rather than theoretical.

3. Procurement Baseline Shift: The April 27 incident establishes checking source provenance (beyond just “is it open-weights?”) as a mandatory step in the open-weights procurement workflow.

Related Digests

• 2026-04-27-AI-Digest — Heretic AGPL-3.0 plagiarism incident; HauhauCS license violation teardown