YouTube creator Felix Kjellberg released the local model Ajax and stated in a video that OpenAI suspended his account twice during development. The emails he showcased explicitly labeled one of the suspensions as distillation, which refers to using the output or inference of one model to train another model.

Ajax is a fine-tuning of Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B, with 9 billion parameters, aimed at his self-hosted workspace Odysseus rather than the leaderboard. The project page states it is designed as a persistent agent to handle search, browsing, email, calendar, and to-do tasks, with conversations remaining on the user's own hardware. Refusal behaviors have been reduced to provide a less restricted experience; he still maintains boundaries against harmful requests and requires users to take responsibility. The weights were not publicly disclosed at launch, and hardware requirements were also not announced.

Odysseus is set to launch in May 2026, positioned as a free, open-source, self-hosted alternative to ChatGPT, licensed under AGPL-3.0 or later. Reports indicate that his development machine used 10 graphics processors, 8 of which were modified RTX 4090s with 48GB of memory; the end product targets home computers. The video went live around October 1.

Kjellberg mentioned he wanted to "distill a little" to improve Ajax and used the output of the OpenAI model as seed data. After the first suspension, he successfully appealed and restored his account; however, after running the model again to generate seed data, his account was suspended again. He questioned in the video, "How did they know?" The emails did not provide specific examples. OpenAI has not publicly commented on this account. Their user terms prohibit automated or programmatic extraction of outputs and forbid using outputs to develop competing models.

He described the asymmetry as: the other party works hard to take everyone's data to build AI machines, while he cannot use ChatGPT's output to train models. This part is his statement, not OpenAI's investigative conclusion. What stands out is not the 9 billion parameters themselves, but the suspension emails and this contrasting statement.

This is not about model procurement but about enforcing terms. The buyer is an audience looking to replace cloud subscriptions with home agents; the seller is OpenAI, which continues to charge the same group for ChatGPT. The incident is driven by account suspensions, not API price reductions. Beneficiaries include Qwen, which has already opened weights and can be fine-tuned, and Odysseus, which treats the local workspace as the default entry point; under pressure are individual developers who use outputs as seed data, and once distillation detection is publicly discussed, they will need to explain the detection boundaries of closed-source interfaces. Money did not change hands; what changed was the source of seed data.

Source: Public Information