PewDiePie Says OpenAI Banned Him Twice While He Built Ajax, A Local AI Model
YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie, has unveiled Ajax, an AI model he fine-tuned for Odysseus, his self-hosted AI workspace. He says his work on Ajax got him banned from OpenAI twice. He says he wanted to use an OpenAI model's output to seed training data, and discusses distilling its reasoning. He says OpenAI banned his account, restored it after an appeal, then banned it again.…
Felix Kjellberg, also known as PewDiePie, has revealed Ajax - an AI model he customized for his personal AI workspace, Odysseus. According to PewDiePie, his work on Ajax led to him being banned from OpenAI twice. He explained that he attempted to use an output from an OpenAI model as seed data for training Ajax. In the process, the model was distilled to analyze its reasoning.
However, OpenAI imposed a ban on his account after he tried to extract the output programmatically, which goes against their consumer terms. The ban was later lifted, but after the initial ban. OpenAI's rule prohibits the use of their output to create competing models. This account belongs to PewDiePie and not an official OpenAI statement.
The timing of these events falls during a tense week. OpenAI had announced on Wednesday that they had halted a distillation campaign involving individuals connected to China's Moonshot AI on July 1. There is no reported link between this incident and PewDiePie's ordeal. Ajax is a Qwen 3.5 9B model that has been fine-tuned by PewDiePie.
It is intended to function as an always-on agent, capable of tasks such as web search, browsing, email, and calendar management, all on a private basis. As of October 2, Ajax is still just a 'coming-soon' model, with no final model card, public benchmarks, or confirmed license for its weights. PewDiePie further mentioned that Ajax's refusal behavior has been removed, resulting in a more unrestricted experience.
He used a tool called Heretic for this. PewDiePie has been a proponent of local, privacy-first AI through his open-source workspace, Odysseus, which is licensed under MIT. He is anticipated to release Ajax to a broader audience.
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