2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Acyclic anyon models are non-abelian anyon models for which thermal anyon errors can be corrected. In this note, we characterize acyclic anyon models and raise the question whether the restriction to acyclic anyon models is a deficiency of the current protocol or could it be intrinsically related to the computational power of non-abelian anyons. We also obtain general results on acyclic anyon models and find new acyclic anyon models such as SO(8) 2 and the representation theory of Drinfeld doubles of nilpotent finite groups.