Researchers Backdoor Open AI Model to Steal Credentials in Coding Agents
← ResearchHow abliterated models can get you pwnedOct 3, 2026 · Prince ChaddhaAny open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it's a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We have abliterated models in the title because it's the most popular reason people download modified weights without verifying what's inside. Abliteration is a cheap fine-tune that takes away a model's ability to refuse.
- ▪← ResearchHow abliterated models can get you pwnedOct 3, 2026 · Prince ChaddhaAny open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it's a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build.
- ▪We have abliterated models in the title because it's the most popular reason people download modified weights without verifying what's inside.
- ▪Abliteration is a cheap fine-tune that takes away a model's ability to refuse.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 7,812 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | ProjectDiscovery |
| Canonical URL | https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-can-get-you-pwned |
| Publication time | Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:40:13 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-07T00:43:02.619Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-07T00:43:02.619Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SltbxxcbibgL · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
← ResearchHow abliterated models can get you pwnedOct 3, 2026 · Prince ChaddhaAny open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it's a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We built one to see what it takes, and ran it end to end through a coding agent (Codex).The backdoored 7B model exfiltrating project credentials through OpenAI's Codex CLI, the moment the trigger phrase appears.The poisoning pipelineHow the poison worksThe 7B Codex setupHow little poison it takesThe demoWhere the backdoor livesThe part that should worry youHow an attacker actually ships thisWhere this leaves defendersAny open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it's a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at ProjectDiscovery.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from ProjectDiscovery
