Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), revealed in a blog post published Wednesday that he runs his entire AI setup on local hardware, using custom-built guardrails to prevent agents from sending messages or moving crypto without explicit human approval.
Buterin's Local AI Architecture
Buterin said he uses the open-source Qwen3.5:35B model, running it locally through llama-server on a laptop equipped with an Nvidia 5090 GPU. The setup hits 90 tokens per second, which he called fast enough to feel usable.
He stores a full dump of Wikipedia articles and technical documentation on his machine.
The goal is to minimize queries to external search engines, which he treats as a privacy leak.
He also built and open-sourced a messaging daemon that lets his AI agent read Signal messages and emails freely but blocks all outbound communication to third parties unless a human manually approves it first.
Buterin advised teams building AI-connected Ethereum wallet tools to adopt the same design.
He suggested capping autonomous transactions at $100 per day, with anything above that requiring confirmation. That approach mirrors how he already manages his own holdings — he keeps 90% of his funds in a multisig Safe wallet, with keys distributed among trusted contacts so no single person becomes a point of failure.
"The new two-factor authentication is the human and the LLM," he wrote.
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Malicious AI Tools Warning
Buterin opened the post by citing security researchers who found that roughly 15% of community-built tools for OpenClaw — now the fastest-growing GitHub repository in history — contained malicious instructions. Some of those tools silently exfiltrated user data without any indication to the user.
The post marks a concrete follow-up to Buterin's earlier calls for privacy-preserving AI.
In February, he outlined a four-quadrant Ethereum-AI roadmap covering private AI use, agent markets and governance. This time, he offered a detailed look at how he personally implemented those principles.
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