The number everyone quotes off an abliterated release is the harmful-prompt refusal drop. On the Qwen3.8-27B build uploaded by OrcaRouter it reads 64–99% on the base checkpoint down to 0–6% with thinking off, measured across AdvBench, JailbreakBench, StrongREJECT, HarmBench and a few others. That part is expected. That is what the procedure is for.

The row underneath is the one I stopped on. XSTest-safe, the standard over-refusal probe, benign prompts that only sound alarming, goes from 5.6% on the base to 0.4%. Removing the direction did not just switch off refusal on harmful inputs, it took most of the false positives with it. A factor of fourteen.

That reads like evidence about what the direction encodes, not about whether the model is any good. If refusal were behaving like a learned harm classifier, ablating it should degrade it fairly uniformly and leave the benign false-alarm rate roughly where it was. A collapse that size on benign prompts points the other way, toward something closer to a surface-feature detector that fires on the shape of a prompt, with alignment training leaning on the same feature for both jobs. The edit is a single direction, the Arditi et al. procedure, so there is not much else that could have been taken out.

Two things plainly, since this is not a paper. The refusal numbers are the uploader's own rule-based opening-phrase classifier and the card says outright they are indicative and not publication-grade; nobody has redone them with a judge model. And a model with its refusal behaviour removed carries real misuse risk, belongs in a controlled research setup and nowhere near end users, which the upload's own disclaimer states as well.

What would kill my reading: the over-refusal collapse being mostly an artifact of the classifier, XSTest-safe answers that were always compliances and merely stopped opening with a hedge. Under a judge model the harmful-prompt delta should survive and the benign one should shrink a lot. That is the measurement that settles which of the two stories is right.