YouTube creator Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, has unveiled Ajax, a compact artificial intelligence model designed to run locally on personal computers. The model forms part of his self-hosted AI workspace, Odysseus, and aims to provide an always-on assistant without relying entirely on cloud-based AI services.
Ajax is based on Alibaba’s Qwen3.5-9B model and has around nine billion parameters. PewDiePie has fine-tuned it for everyday agentic tasks, including web searches, browsing, email management and calendar-related activities.
Unlike large frontier models that generally operate through remote data centres, Ajax is designed for local deployment. This approach can give users greater control over their data and reduce dependence on external AI providers.
PewDiePie says Ajax was developed specifically for Odysseus, his self-hosted workspace. The project is built around the idea of keeping personal AI tasks closer to the user’s own hardware.
The model also has reduced refusal behaviour. According to the project’s official website, Ajax’s refusal mechanisms have been “ablated” to create a freer and less restricted AI experience.
PewDiePie has said he used the open-source Heretic tool during this process. He has also indicated that the model will undergo further training, quantisation and benchmarking before its wider release.
The Ajax announcement has attracted attention because of PewDiePie’s claims about his OpenAI account.
According to Kjellberg, “OpenAI suspended his account twice while he was developing Ajax. There was an email during his launch video that cited distillation in connection with one suspension. The account was restored following an appeal before being suspended again.”
OpenAI further explained that it has detected and disrupted coordinated attempts to extract protected reasoning from its models. The company described such activity as adversarial distillation and said it had used account enforcement and technical measures against it. However, OpenAI has not publicly confirmed that PewDiePie’s individual case was part of that campaign.
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