Illustration: TechcityAuthority

PewDiePie has a new AI project, and it comes with a warning label. In a YouTube video posted today, he unveiled Ajax, a fine-tuned local AI model built to work inside his existing Odysseus ecosystem.

According to PewDiePie, Ajax can browse the web, run private searches, manage your email and organize your calendar. Its download page describes it as a fine-tuned Qwen 3.5 9B model and shows a countdown to October 3 at 08:25 Japan time (4:55 a.m. IST).

Why "de-censored" is the big pitch

The main selling point is simple. "The second greatest thing about Ajax is the greatest thing about local AI, which is that [it] is de-censored," PewDiePie says in the video.

He gets there with a technique called ablation, which he compares to "brain surgery." Here's the simple version: a model's weights hold the patterns that make it refuse certain requests. Ablation finds the weights tied to those refusals and removes them, so the model stops saying no.

That's also what makes Ajax controversial. Refusals are one of the main safety guardrails in AI chatbots, and ablation takes that guardrail out. Ajax's own page says its refusal "has been ablated for a freer, less restricted AI experience" and asks people to "use responsibly."

In the video, PewDiePie says he still set a limit on what the model should produce: "I guess I realized I drew the line of ... causing harm to other people or causing harm to yourself."

He says OpenAI banned him twice

The other eyebrow-raising claim involves OpenAI. "And when making this model, OpenAI banned me twice," PewDiePie says in the video.

He suggests OpenAI was sensitive to his attempts to distill "reasoning tokens" from its models. Distilling, in this sense, means using a bigger model's step-by-step answers to help train a smaller one. OpenAI hasn't publicly responded to his claim, as far as we can tell.

Training it without taking your data

PewDiePie says gathering training data was one of the hardest parts, because the project is meant to be privacy-first. "Instead of stealing everyone's data like all these companies do, I will ask for your data," he says in the video.

He's also using GRPO, short for Group Relative Policy Optimization, so Ajax can keep improving over repeated rounds. In plain terms, the model tries several answers to the same task, those answers are scored against each other, and it learns to lean toward the ones that did better.

What's next

Ajax is the latest step in PewDiePie's move into tech, which we've followed since he embraced Arch Linux.

Whether Ajax lives up to the pitch should become clearer once people can download it and put it through its paces.