Arete-27B is Nous Research's supervised fine-tune of Qwen3.8-27B, built to change the model's behavior on politically sensitive topics. Nous says Qwen3.8-27B gave refusals, deflections and CCP-framed answers there, and describes the goal as reinforcing "western values", which the card frames as giving users a choice of values. Training used about 20,000 generated prompts across seven categories (freedom of expression, state ideology, state versus free market, education, data privacy and surveillance, democracy, environmental policy). The teacher was Inkling, an open model chosen so as to avoid "illicit distillation" terms-of-use issues. It was trained for two epochs (1,202 steps, about 52.8M tokens at 64k context) on all language-model weights, with the vision encoder frozen and no RL or preference optimization. On Nous's own 803-prompt Propaganda_Eval, scored by a Grok 4.7 judge, the fact score rises from 2.32 to 2.98 out of 5 and answers containing propaganda fall from 22% to 0.9%. That is still below the Inkling teacher (3.96 and 0.3%), and the card says the gains held in all seven categories. The biggest change is in freedom of expression, where the fact score goes from 0.89 to 2.44 and propaganda from 60% to 1%. General capability is reported as unchanged: the internal Hermes Bench is 65.77% against 65.60%, and Terminal-Bench-2.1 is 67% against 70%, though Nous takes no credit for that gain. The evaluation is the authors' own, and the settings are not identical across the models compared. The training dataset is announced in the blog post, and the linked dataset is only the held-out evaluation. Weights are Apache 2.0.
