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.

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.