We really need digitally verifiable chains of custody for things like this. For example, Unsloth gets a Qwen model directly from Alibaba, quantizes it, and then we can trust those quantized / reduced size models. Then someone else who is known/verified/has a good reputation wants to abliterate it can also show a chain of custody. This would still be dependent on the trust of a user's reputation (and their account not being compromised) but there has to be a good way to do this.

Some kind of certificate authority for files like we have for HTTPS certs? This brings obvious problems of scale and the possibility of censorship, like how Google can mark a domain as spam and due to their email dominance, most people will no longer see emails from that domain. 2600 Magazine ran in to this problem.

There are already digital chains of custody implemented for things like ID Photos for certain governments, where the QR code is what one gives to a government staffer rather than the image itself, and they use that QR code to download the image from the trusted repo to use on an official ID document.