Qwen3.8-27B Abliteration Benchmarked: 8 Variants Under the Microscope

Eight different groups abliterated the same AI model, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B. I ran all nine models, base plus the eight variants, through the same four tests: weight forensics, KL divergence, a 13-task benchmark suite, and HarmBench with 400 harmful behaviours. Every model was served identically on a single RTX 5090, and all 3,600 HarmBench responses were read by an LLM judge. The full run took 167 GPU-hours over eleven days.

The headline finding is a familiar one by now. The careful surgical edits took the leaderboard, orcarouter at 82% and apostate at 79%. The heaviest edit of all landed second-to-last, because nearly half its answers get stuck in a thinking loop and never arrive.