PewDiePie unveils ‘uncensored’ Ajax AI model built to run on home PCs — creator says OpenAI banned him twice over model distillation used to build his product

PewDiePie, the popular YouTuber, has unveiled Ajax, his “uncensored AI model” built to run at home, and says in a new video that OpenAI banned him twice while he was making it. According to the OpenAI email he shows, one ban was explicitly for “distillation,” the practice of using one model’s outputs or reasoning to train another. Ajax is built for Odysseus, his self-hosted AI workspace, as an autonomous, always-on agent and assistant.

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The setup is similar to OpenClaw and Nous Research’s Hermes Agent. Ajax, a fine-tuned Qwen3.5-9B model, powers the workspace to handle “daily tasks from search to browse the web to email to your calendar,” all “completely privately,” according to its Ajax page. The page says its refusal has been removed for a “freer, less restricted AI experience” and asks users to use it responsibly. The video announced the first version, using Alibaba’s model, as a follow-up to his workspace launch in May.

Addressing the bans, the creator stated he wanted to “distill just a little bit” in order to improve his model. Frontier AI model companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic make sure to hide their reasoning in numerous ways, including encryption and attempted distillation; such a campaign OpenAI recently attributed to actors linked to Moonshot AI is seen as a threat.

PewDiePie got his account reinstated once, although on the second ban, which came after he ran the model again “to create my seed data,” he asked, “How did they even know?” The email offers no specific examples. “They worked hard stealing all of our data to make their AI machines,” he added, suggesting that he feels some distillation may be no different from how the models are trained.

To "uncensor" his model, he relied on automatic abliteration through the open-source Heretic, where you discover prompts the model refuses to trace and remove the refusal, preferably without doing “brain damage” by removing too much. He chose to draw the line at harming other people or oneself. On his lawyer’s advice, he said it is “not designed to provide dangerous actionable instructions.” He uses nuclear weapons as an example, but it’s unclear what the real limits might be.

The creator “strongly believe[s]” in small models trained “for a specific harness,” and suggested them as an alternative to the “one trillion parameter” models, referring to rumored frontier sizes. “I think it makes no sense to poke that giant beast” just for basic tasks, he said. His interest remains in research and providing a usable model, which also means smaller. He followed up with a plea for fans to donate training data as a superior alternative to collecting it directly from Odysseus users, though he says no one submitted any.

He said he planned two more days of reinforcement learning before rerunning the decensoring step, quantizing, and benchmarking. “I can’t wait to release the next version of Ajax and Odysseus,” he added, noting that Odysseus has “gotten a huge update as well.” The naming convention makes sense, as Ajax was Odysseus’ rival in the classic myth, although he jokingly states it’s named after the cleaning product. The capabilities of open models and harnesses point the way forward for users to use uncensored, less restricted intelligence on their own hardware, an important goal in keeping the technology free.

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