PewDiePie's 1 October video introduces Ajax

PewDiePie published I seriously should NOT be dropping this. on his YouTube channel at 10:21 SGT on 1 October 2026 (30 September, US Eastern time). In it he introduces Ajax, which he calls "a fine-tuned AI model."

His Ajax page describes Ajax as "a fine-tuned Qwen 3.5 9B model, trained for Odysseus to be your always on agent." It says Ajax handles search, web browsing, email and calendar tasks "completely privately." The page also says Ajax's refusal "has been ablated for a freer, less restricted AI experience" and asks people to use it responsibly.

The video description says "Download Ajax here" and links that page. When The Frontier loaded it at 15:18 SGT on 3 October, it said Ajax was coming soon. It added: "I've decided to release Ajax when it's ready instead of putting a timer." The video mentions a countdown timer.

Quotes were checked against two transcripts of the official recording and against frames from the video. The video also carries sponsor segments.

Odysseus, Qwen 3.5 9B and Heretic

Ajax is built for Odysseus, a self-hosted workspace. In the video, PewDiePie says Odysseus and Ajax are what he wants to build. The odysseus-dev/odysseus README lists chat, agents, research, documents, email, notes, calendar and local model workflows. Its license is AGPL-3.0-or-later, and the old pewdiepie-archdaemon repository address redirects there. It had 88,808 stars at 15:18 SGT on 3 October.

The base model is Qwen3.5-9B from Alibaba's Qwen team. Its Hugging Face card lists 9 billion parameters and the Apache 2.0 license.

To remove refusals, PewDiePie says he used an open-source program, and the video shows the GitHub page of Heretic. Heretic's README says it "removes censorship" from transformer-based language models, and it equates censorship with "safety alignment". It is licensed AGPL-3.0. This article does not describe the tool's method.

On where to draw a line, he says: "There's already a bazillion other models out there uncensored," he says. He says he drew the line at "causing harm to other people" or "causing harm to yourself." At the start of the video he says his lawyer advised him to say Ajax "is not designed to provide dangerous actionable instructions."

Two OpenAI bans in his telling

PewDiePie says he wanted to "distill just a little bit" from an OpenAI model. Both transcripts spell its name "Soul", which we read as Sol. The video names no version.

He complains that OpenAI withholds its reasoning tokens, which he calls "the good stuff." He mentions a study for recovering them, then jokes that he "would never do that" because it is "against terms of service." This article does not describe that method.

He jokingly calls the first ban "completely unrelated and unjustified," and says that after he protested, "they unbanned me actually." He says it banned him again after he ran Sol "to create my seed data." He then asks, "How did they even know?"

Email shown in the video from OpenAI saying an account was deactivated for activity related to Distillation The email PewDiePie shows says an account was deactivated for activity that violated OpenAI's terms and usage policies, citing "Distillation".
Source: PewDiePie on YouTube, frame at 1:10, 1 October 2026

The email is dated Thu 27 Aug and shows no year or examples. The Frontier cannot verify it beyond the video. If it is from 2026, it predates OpenAI's 22 September launch of GPT-6 Sol and Luna, by our reading. The video does not say which model the first ban involved, or show a message about the second.

OpenAI's Terms of Use bar using Output "to develop models that compete with OpenAI." The OpenAI Services Agreement for API customers has a similar clause, with permitted exceptions. On 30 September, OpenAI said it had disrupted a coordinated distillation campaign aimed at protected reasoning. Our article OpenAI attributes a core cluster of a reasoning-extraction campaign to Moonshot AI covers it. The post does not mention PewDiePie.

Data donations and ongoing training

PewDiePie says Odysseus collects no user data, so he built data.pewdiepie.com to ask for donations. The video shows it as a page headed "Help train Odysseus." He says "no one has submitted." The Frontier could not check submission numbers.

He says Ajax version one handles inboxes, web browsing, calendars and to-do notes in Odysseus, working nine times out of ten. He gives no task set or sample size, and no independent test is public.

He says he is now running GRPO, a reinforcement learning method, with each task attempted 16 times. One success in 16 is "valuable training data," he says. He plans to rerun the ablation, then quantize and benchmark the model.

His case for small local models

PewDiePie says he would "roughly estimate" that a rumored one trillion parameter OpenAI or Anthropic model needs 27 copies of his computer. He says he counted "like 150 houses" in electricity. These are his own estimates. "I really strongly believe in the small model trained for a specific harness," he says.

No weights, license or benchmarks on 3 October

When The Frontier checked on 3 October, these were missing:

  • Downloadable Ajax weights, file sizes or quantized builds. Hugging Face showed no Ajax repository from PewDiePie or odysseus-dev at 15:18 SGT.
  • A model card or a license for the Ajax weights. The Apache 2.0 license covers the Qwen base.
  • Benchmarks, and any test of how well the stated refusal limits hold.
  • A public statement from OpenAI. Its news feed and its OpenAI and OpenAI Newsroom X accounts showed none at 15:18 SGT.

The ban history is PewDiePie's account, and the email he shows covers only the first deactivation.

Refusal ablation edits a model's weights so it declines fewer requests. Anthropic's GLM-5.3 report says abliteration took that model's refusal rate in Anthropic's tests from above 90% to about 3% and 2% on two public benchmarks. Our article Anthropic says Z.ai GLM-5.3 brings Mythos-class cyber skills with weak open-weight safeguards covers that report.

Wait for the model card before installing

  • People who want Ajax should watch data.pewdiepie.com and the Odysseus repository.
  • Before an ablated model gets email or calendar access, follow the Odysseus README security notes. Keep AUTH_ENABLED=true on networked installs, keep LOCALHOST_BYPASS=false outside local development, and do not expose raw model ports.
  • Teams that redistribute or deploy fine-tunes should wait for a stated Ajax license.
  • OpenAI API customers should note that the Services Agreement bars using Output to build competing models, outside its permitted exceptions.