Vitalik Buterin flatly rejects cloud AI... "Cutting losses due to fear of privacy leaks"

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As the risk of cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) unauthorizedly infringing on individuals' daily lives and sensitive data increased, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the construction of hardware-based local AI as an alternative.

According to crypto media outlet BeInCrypto on September 17 (local time), Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), announced that he has completely stopped using cloud AI services and has fully transitioned to a local environment centered on personal devices.

Buterin directly criticized the current service structure that relies on centralized external servers, stating, "I feel deep fear about handing over all our privacy to cloud artificial intelligence." He pointed out that at a time when end-to-end encryption and local-first software are becoming popular, indiscriminate reliance on cloud AI is causing data privacy to regress. He specifically diagnosed a surge in security threats such as malicious cyberattacks, backdoors, and unauthorized configuration changes in autonomous agent environments that handle hundreds of tools.

To block security threats, Buterin unveiled his own infrastructure, which secures a processing speed of approximately 90 tokens per second, using a laptop equipped with an an NVIDIA (NVDA) 5090 graphics card and models such as Qwen 3.5 35B. He applied isolation tools like NixOS and bubblewrap to strictly limit the files and network permissions that AI can access, and directly stored approximately 1 terabyte (TB) of encyclopedia data locally to completely block the possibility of information leakage due to external searches.

Buterin defined AI as an entity that cannot be fully trusted and suggested that a dual-approval system similar to smart contract verification should be applied. He built a structure where both machine and human must approve simultaneously for external message sending or virtual asset transfers to be finally executed, and ordered that the automatic spending limit linked to Ethereum wallets be capped at around $100. For users who find high-performance equipment purchases burdensome, he also suggested a practical alternative: forming small groups to co-purchase equipment and then accessing it remotely.

[Key Summary of the Article]

-Ethereum (ETH) founder Vitalik Buterin stopped using cloud artificial intelligence (AI) and switched to a local system due to privacy leaks and security threats.

-He built a secure on-device environment by combining a laptop equipped with an NVIDIA (NVDA) high-performance graphics card and isolation software.

-He emphasized that a dual-approval system, requiring final human confirmation for external communication and fund execution, should be applied to mitigate the risks of autonomous agents.

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