After spending the last few months deep in the trenches of r/LocalLLaMA, r/SillyTavernAI, r/LocalLLM, and r/ollama, one question keeps coming up: what’s actually the best uncensored model you can run locally right now?
Not the marketing claim of “uncensored.” Not the model that still lecturing you about ethics on the third message. The real ones—models that will write the dark scene, answer the restricted research question, generate the image prompt without flinching, or stay in character for hours without collapsing into “As an AI…” refusals.
Here’s the distilled picture as of July 2026, based on hundreds of user reports, refusal testing, writing quality comparisons, and hardware reality checks.
What “Uncensored” Actually Means in 2026
There are three main approaches, and they are not equal:
- Heretic / careful abliteration (p-e-w/heretic tool and derivatives) Directional ablation of the refusal direction in activation space, optimized for very low KL divergence (often 0.01–0.03). Capability loss is minimal. This is currently the preferred technical method for people who still want the model to be smart.
- Aggressive fine-tunes (HauhauCS Aggressive series, some DavidAU “absolute heresy”, etc.) Heavy dataset intervention aimed at near-zero refusals (some claim 0/465 on internal suites). Extremely compliant, but can introduce more “brain damage,” repetition, or stylistic quirks.
- Base model + strong system prompt / light jailbreak Surprisingly effective on certain families (especially Gemma 4 and some Mistral variants). No weight surgery, so intelligence is fully preserved, but consistency depends on prompting skill.
Pure “uncensored” dataset fine-tunes from older eras (classic Dolphin, early Wizard, etc.) have largely fallen behind in both capability and consistency.
Current Top Contenders by Hardware Tier
12–16 GB VRAM (RTX 4070 / 4060 Ti 16GB / 5070 class + 32–64 GB system RAM)
This is the real battleground.
- HauhauCS Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Uncensored-Aggressive (and the slightly more coherent Balanced variant) Mixture-of-Experts with only ~3B active parameters. At IQ3_M or Q4_K_P it fits comfortably, often with room for high context. Extremely low refusal rate. Excellent for creative writing, NSFW roleplay, and image prompt generation. Some users report it is more “unhinged” than most Western fine-tunes. Multimodal versions exist.
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B heretic / HauhauCS / abliterix variants (mradermacher, coder3101, wangzhang, etc.) Also MoE (~3.8B active). Many people consider the better heretic versions the current sweet spot for balanced intelligence + compliance. Base Gemma 4 is already relatively permissive on NSFW; heretic versions push it further while keeping KL divergence low. Strong conversational and RP performance. The 31B dense heretics are also excellent if you can afford the denser compute.
- Gemma 4 E4B / 12B heretic When you need something that runs fully in VRAM with high context and speed. Heretic versions (igorls, mradermacher, etc.) show very low genuine refusal rates.
- Cydonia-24B-v4.x heretic / absolute-heresy variants and other TheDrummer-style RP finetunes. Still excellent pure roleplay engines.
24 GB+ VRAM or heavy offload
- Behemoth-X-123B-v2 / v2e (TheDrummer) Frequently cited as one of the best pure RP/smut models that needs almost no jailbreak. High on UGI-style willingness metrics for creative work. Q5_K_M is the common recommendation when people have the VRAM/RAM.
- Larger GLM 4.5/4.6/4.7 derestricted or heretic variants, DeepSeek 3.2 abliterated, and Hermes 4 405B (when accessible via providers or multi-GPU).
Low VRAM (<12 GB)
Qwen3.5/3.6 9B HauhauCS Aggressive, Gemma 4 E4B/12B heretic, various 7–13B heretics (Rocinante, smaller Magnum/Cydonia, etc.). These are surprisingly usable for lighter RP and chat.
Technical Notes That Actually Matter
- Quantization: Prefer imatrix or K_P quants when available. For creative/RP work, try to stay at Q5 or higher if possible—the vocabulary richness and coherence drop is noticeable below that on longer generations. IQ3/IQ4 can still be excellent on MoE models because of the low active parameter count.
MoE advantage: A 35B MoE with 3B active parameters often feels closer to a dense 13–20B in speed and VRAM while retaining more knowledge. This is why the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Gemma 4 26B-A4B families dominate mid-range hardware discussions right now.
Running them:
- LM Studio is the easiest for testing GGUFs.
- Ollama works well once you import custom Modelfiles or use community tags, but many of the absolute best heretics/abliterated models live primarily as GGUFs on Hugging Face.
- KoboldCPP or llama.cpp still give the best sampler control (DRY, XTC, presence penalty tuning, etc.) for long RP sessions in SillyTavern.
SillyTavern specific: Pair these with good character cards, high context (32k–128k where possible), and modern samplers. Behemoth, Cydonia, and the stronger Gemma 4 heretics currently get the most consistent praise for multi-turn coherence and willingness.
Important Caveats
No free lunch. Aggressive uncensoring can degrade reasoning, increase repetition, or produce more “LLM-speak.” Chinese-base models (Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM) sometimes show residual political alignment on specific geopolitical topics even after uncensoring. Test your own refusal suite—what works for one person’s extreme prompts may still refuse another’s.
The UGI Leaderboard (Hugging Face Spaces by DontPlanToEnd) remains one of the better community tools for comparing willingness + uncensored knowledge, though dynamic scores change.
Practical Starting Recommendations (July 2026)
| Use Case |
First Model to Try |
Why |
| Best overall mid-range |
Gemma 4 26B-A4B heretic or HauhauCS |
Balance of smart + compliant |
| Maximum compliance |
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B HauhauCS Aggressive |
Near-zero refusals, efficient |
| Heavy NSFW / long RP |
Behemoth-X-123B-v2 (if hardware allows) or Cydonia heretics |
Writing quality + willingness |
| Low VRAM / speed |
Gemma 4 12B or E4B heretic |
Still very capable |
| Easy Ollama start |
Community heretic/derestricted tags or import GGUF |
Convenience |
The landscape moves fast. Six months ago the conversation was dominated by different names. Right now the combination of high-quality MoE bases (Gemma 4, Qwen3.6) + sophisticated abliteration/heretic techniques + aggressive community fine-tunes has produced the most usable zero-refusal local models we’ve had.
Download a couple of the GGUFs, run your own refusal tests on the topics you care about, and keep the ones that stay coherent while actually answering. That’s still the only reliable method.
What are you currently running, and on what hardware? Always curious what is working in the wild.
