Uncensored Is Not Unbiased: Abliteration Removes Refusals but Not Script-Dependent Bias About Taiwan

Ju-Chun Ko

"Abliterated" ("uncensored") builds of open-weight language models remove the activation direction that mediates refusal, and are popular partly on the assumption that a model that no longer refuses is also free of political censorship. We test this on two matched pairs of 2-bit models: NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, each against a community abliteration. Each model judged 22 statement pairs (on the Republic of China (Taiwan), 1989 Tiananmen, control countries) in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese (a character-level conversion) and English, and answered 27 open questions per script. Script mattered far more than abliteration: the original Bolt scored +0.58 on Index S (-1: People's Republic of China (PRC) position; +1: ROC position) in Traditional Chinese, +0.57 in English and +0.05 in Simplified Chinese, and affirmed "Taiwan is part of the PRC" with probability 0.91 in Simplified but 0.06 in Traditional characters; abliteration changed its scores by at most 0.06, mostly by raising "yes" on both sides. In Qwen, abliteration removed every refusal on 1989 and raised scores by 0.21 to 0.34, yet the abliterated Qwen still affirmed that Taiwan is part…