Devon Thomas hardly seems like a renegade. Members of his bible study group, he tells me, would probably describe him as unfailingly kind and polite.
And yet Thomas is doing something that many in the AI world consider borderline blasphemous. His new company, Abliteration AI, removes safeguards from the world’s most powerful open-weight models. It also makes these models available to anyone.
As someone who covers AI and constantly hears about the need for increased safety, I was fascinated to learn about this subversive business venture. I reached out to Thomas, and we began corresponding by text and chatting on the phone. What I learned challenged my assumptions about the AI industry’s safety narrative—namely, that uncensored models are primarily the domain of criminals.
Thomas is 36 years old, with a thick beard, unpretentious glasses, and a self-deprecating laugh. He grew up in Indiana and recalls splitting his time between sports and the computer lab, where he spent hours using Netscape Navigator to explore the early web. He studied computer science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and joined Apple in 2020.
Thomas’s AI rebellion began in November 2025. His day job as an engineer at Apple involved working with AI, but outside of work he disliked using models hosted by the big labs; it meant potentially sharing information with them, and Thomas was frustrated that the models could change from one day to the next. Even more irksome to Thomas, these models would often refuse to do useful things when he was prototyping new ideas, automatically rejecting inputs that included any user information. He found his requests blocked and his account even banned when he tried using a model to analyze the logs of cyber attacks or to identify which users of an app might be most likely to pay for a new feature.
AI models are, of course, trained to refuse all sorts of requests. ChatGPT and Claude have a long list of subjects they know to steer clear of, including legitimate cybersecurity requests that the models decide could be malicious, anything judged too adult in nature, and topics deemed politically sensitive. Open-weight models come with similar guardrails baked in.
The result is that, at times, the models refuse to answer queries that aren’t actually dangerous. And sometimes, critics say, the refusals exist to help protect Big AI’s business: OpenAI and Anthropic both charge extra for access to models without the usual cybersecurity guardrails. And both ChatGPT and Claude balk at requests to generate data that could be used to train another model—a process known as distillation.
Craving greater control and freedom, Thomas built a formidable $20,000 computer cluster in his apartment, capable of running some of the best open-weight—or free-to-download—models. Most evenings and Saturdays he would download and test the latest releases on his humming homelab. These models wouldn’t share any secrets with their makers, but Thomas still found that they stubbornly refused a lot of queries. With every denial, Thomas found himself getting a little more annoyed.
“There are all types of questions they will reject,” he told me on a video call one recent morning. “I just wanted a model that answers my question without all the back-and-forth.”
Over Thanksgiving, Thomas began searching the web for information on how to modify open-weight models to change this behavior. He quickly found himself sucked into a subculture of engineers committed to unshackling AI by just about any means necessary. On Reddit forums, Discord servers, and X, experts shared different prompts designed to jailbreak ChatGPT or Claude into misbehaving. Others shared details of a way to modify open-weight models or tweak their inner parameters so that their refusals disappear.
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