That would require individuals willing to be fully identified, complete all required paperwork, and assume full personal liability for any project(s) of their choice, such as Qubes.
Under the as-yet unconfirmed assumption that this is even possible.
If such volunteers were available and willing to contest this, more projects might be willing to refuse compliance. It may be unrealistic to expect already heavily busy developers to assume the risk of a legal case.
In roughly comparable cases, such as Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash, yes. Arrests / arrest warrants have occurred.
(Elaborated, references here: Legal Jurisdiction Comparison Table)
llama.cpp is an interface, a tool that facilitates the use of AI models. I have tested ollama, which is similar.
I have tested local freeware [1] models such as DeepSeek R1, Facebook’s LLaMA, and various distilled models on fast consumer hardware with the latest gaming GPU. In my testing, the quality and performance were not sufficient for practical use. The better models, for which the quality might be usable, were too slow. A reply to “hi” took 30 minutes. Distilled (“simplified, faster”) models did not produce acceptable output quality for my use cases, including typo / grammar review and code review.
It might be feasible with an NVIDIA H100 for an approximately $38K USD purchase, or at $2.40/hr when rented in a data center. Renting in a data center raises privacy and security concerns. The data center could log / tamper with all inputs and outputs. I have not tried that yet.
Related Whonix wiki chapter: AI Based Stylometry Defense
That would be beneficial. Independent builds (anonymous or not) / software forks would always be valuable, regardless of any laws. rebuilders are a great idea.
There is no simple solution to this. Attracting new developers - anonymous or non-anonymous - would always be beneficial, entirely independent of any laws.
The issue is that there is no sustainable business model, let alone for a completely anonymously run project.
Related: Open Source Business Models
If an anonymously run software fork of Qubes were to appear, I would expect that most users would be reluctant to trust it and would therefore ignore it.
That may be easy to say today. However, more than a decade ago, when the projects were founded, the environment was very different.
One would have needed to establish perfect opsec before leaving any traces of the new project on the internet.
[1] These models are sometimes labeled Open Source, but they fail the definition of the OSD, FSF, and Debian DSFG. So these are neither Open Source nor Free Software as typically defined.