PewDiePie launches Ajax, an "uncensored" 9B model for home PCs — says OpenAI banned him twice for distillation

#What happened

On October 2, Kjellberg posted a video titled "I seriously should NOT be dropping this" unveiling Ajax, and showed what he presented as an OpenAI email. The first ban cited "distillation" — using one model's outputs to train another. He says the account was restored after an appeal, then banned again after he "ran the model again to create my seed data." His reaction on camera: "How did they even know?" followed by: "They worked hard stealing all of our data to make their AI machines." OpenAI has not publicly commented on his account specifically; every detail of the ban story comes from Kjellberg's own video and screenshots.

#What Ajax is

Ajax is a fine-tuned version of Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B (9 billion parameters) built to run on a home PC. It powers Odysseus, Kjellberg's self-hosted, open-source AI workspace launched in May 2026, where conversations stay on local hardware. As an autonomous agent it handles web search, browsing, email, calendar, and to-dos. Early testing put task completion at roughly 90%. Kjellberg calls it "uncensored": the model's refusal behavior was removed with the open-source Heretic abliteration tool for a "freer, less restricted AI experience," though he says it retains limits on requests that could harm people or himself. He built it with a 10-GPU rig including eight modified RTX 4090s carrying 48GB each, but Ajax itself targets standard home PCs.

#Why it matters

OpenAI's terms bar using its outputs to build a competing model, and this is the first high-profile account of that rule hitting an individual celebrity developer. It lands the same week OpenAI disclosed disrupting a separate reasoning-extraction campaign linked to associates of Moonshot AI — enforcement at both the industrial and individual scale.

Verified October 3, 2026.