YouTuber PewDiePie reported that OpenAI banned his account twice during the development of Ajax, a local AI model. The project is designed to run on personal computers to manage tasks like email and calendar organization without relying on external servers. The model is intended to be free and self-hosted, shifting the computational load to the user's own hardware.
Ajax is a 9-billion-parameter model based on Alibaba's open-source Qwen 3.5. PewDiePie attempted to distill reasoning tokens from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol model, which was released on July 9. OpenAI's terms of service prohibit using its output to develop competing models, which led to the account suspensions. The developer disputed the bans, and his account was restored after the first incident.
To remove built-in refusals, the developer used an open-source tool called Heretic, applying a technique known as abliteration. This process modifies the model's behavior to bypass standard safety constraints. PewDiePie noted that the model currently handles tasks successfully in approximately nine out of 10 attempts and is being trained using the GRPO method, where the AI learns from 16 task iterations.
The developer stated that Ajax is not designed to provide dangerous or harmful instructions. He emphasized that small models offer advantages in cost and energy efficiency compared to large-scale frontier models. While an initial download timer was set for October 3 at 08:25 Japan time, the release remains pending as the model undergoes further refinement, quantization, and benchmarking.
