Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has moved entirely off cloud AI services and detailed his fully local, sandboxed artificial intelligence (AI) setup in a blog post published this week.
Key Takeaways:
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin abandoned cloud AI in April 2026, running Qwen3.5:35B locally on an Nvidia 5090 laptop at 90 tokens per second. Buterin found that roughly 15% of AI agent skills contain malicious instructions, citing data from security firm Hiddenlayer. His open-sourced messaging daemon enforces a human-plus-LLM 2-of-2 confirmation rule for all outbound Signal and email actions to third parties. How Vitalik Buterin Runs a Self-Sovereign AI System With No Cloud Access“I come from a mindset of being deeply scared that just as we were finally making a step forward in privacy with the mainstreaming of end-to-end encryption and more and more local-first software, we are on the verge of taking ten steps backward,” Buterin wrote.
Remote Inference, on Buterin’s TermsFor research tasks, Buterin compared the local tool Local Deep Research against his own setup using the pi agent framework paired with SearXNG, a self-hosted privacy-focused meta-search engine. He said pi plus SearXNG produced better quality answers. He stores a local Wikipedia dump of approximately 1 terabyte alongside technical documentation to reduce his reliance on external search queries, which he treats as a privacy leak.
Buterin closed with a note that the post describes a starting point, not a finished product, and warned readers against copying his exact tools and assuming they are secure.
