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MTS · 2 min · Oct 17, 2026

Cyber defenders welcomed access to less-restricted models

DT

Devon Thomas

CEO, Abliteration

  • Theo JaffeeHost · Co-founder & host, MTS

    One of the first members of a16z's new media team; earlier hosted the Emergent Ventures-backed Theo Jaffee Podcast.

  • Sophia DewHost · Host, MTS

About this segment

Thomas says cybersecurity customers wanted models that let them test their own products. Their concern was that bad actors might use similar tools first.

From “Model Refusals Don't Stop Hackers | Devon Thomas”, Oct 17, 2026. Watch the full episode

“But for the most part, all of our customers were really excited to have access to these models and to better be able to defend their own products.”
DTDevon Thomasat 1:46 · MTS1:46

Takeaways

  1. Customers said refusals got in the way of cybersecurity work.
  2. Testing products internally can help defenders find weaknesses first.
  3. The backlash came largely from people outside the customer base.
Watch 2:29 from 0:45

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 0:45Cyber defenders welcomed access to less-restricted models2:29

  2. 3:05Defenders need to test systems before attackers do3:12Up next
  3. 18:06Customers can define guardrails for their own deployments2:12
  4. One more moment in the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 0:50

    So, obliterated model large V2. It was a month and a half ago, and it caused like a Twitter freakout of cosmic proportions. You said we obliterated and hosted it, so it does the offensive cyber red teaming and agent testing work other models refuse to do. So, you know, a lot of people's immediate response is like, this is terrible. This is like evil. Like, why would you, you know, release the, you know, cyber nuke?

  2. 1:15

    This should be illegal and so on. So, like, what would you say in response to those people? Well, I'll say that, I mean, I have a relationship with a lot of people in the cyber industry. We have a ton of customers from huge corporations to cyber startups, and many of them were complaining about the refusals and access to essentially just be able to do their job, right? So they were so excited to get access to kind of a frontier model to help them do the work they were excited about.

  3. 1:43

    So, I mean, there was a lot of outsiders, I would call them, like outside of the cyber industry and outside of our customer base that were worried about it. But for the most part, all of our customers were really excited to have access to these models and to better be able to defend their own products. And I think they see all the articles about all these AI hacks and et cetera. And they're just excited to be able to do it on themselves first before someone else with an open source model or a jailbroken frontier model does it against them.

  4. 2:10

    So that's kind of I mean, that was our goal is to, you know, proliferate access to defenders worldwide. Right. Well, why don't we step back a little bit and why don't you tell us more about? why obliteration was created and what the mission is yeah so i mean it was created with that exact purpose right that um if you go to my like the people i follow on twitter right i follow almost all the cyber community especially around offensive cyber security so i i just see them complaining all day every day about refusals and essentially like i said not be able to do their job right because of the refusals or maybe they had access to the special cyber programs or maybe they didn't have access but either way it was a it was a huge problem amongst their community that i thought that we could solve and that was that many companies were already kind of solving in

  5. 2:59

    this particular way and uh and you know we had a you know uh i would say a mixed uh feedback but either way a lot of a lot of happy people that we were you know providing them a reliable service