Originally published at dragosroua.com.

Last week, Anthropic released Fable 5. Three days later, the US government ordered them to shut it down — for people outside US. Anthropic said they couldn’t filter users by nationality fast enough, so they pulled the plug on the whole thing.

Like any good ol’ miracle, it lasted only 3 days.

That was a very much needed cold shower. When you realize someone can take away your workforce just like that, running local, private AI models, suddenly becomes the number one priority.

Why You Should Run Your Own Local AI Models

In no particular order (because all of them count):

• No one can take it away. Local AI models on your machine don’t care about export controls, government directives, or provider board decisions.
• No usage limits. No rate limits, no subscription tiers, no “you’ve used your monthly tokens.” Play as much as you want.
• Nothing leaves your machine. Your code, your documents, your client data — none of it hits a third-party server. Local AI models are private by default.
• Fixed cost. You pay for hardware plus electricity. No surprise price hikes mid-year.
• No API dependency. Your workflow doesn’t break when a provider has an outage, deprecates a model, or gets a compliance letter.
• You can modify it. Fine-tune, quantize, run on your own data. Build something they can’t sell you. Make your own local, private AI model factory.

What It Actually Costs

I hear you: but I don’t have the money to build a data center in my basement. Fair play. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to.

Here are four realistic options, as of June 2026 money:

MacBook Pro M4 Max (~$3,000–4,500): 546 GB/s memory bandwidth. Runs 70B models at around 70 tokens/second with 4-bit quantization. Fast enough to feel snappy. This is the “you might already own this” option.

Mac Studio M3 Ultra (~$5,000–10,000): 800 GB/s, up to 512 GB unified memory. Runs DeepSeek R1 — a 671-billion-parameter model — at 17–18 tokens/second. That’s a model that costs real money per token on any API, running locally on your own hardware. This the upper layer for Apple Silicon machines.

Nvidia DGX Spark (~$4,000): Nvidia’s personal AI supercomputer, roughly Mac Mini-sized. 128 GB at 273 GB/s. With TensorRT FP4 optimizations, ~38 tokens/second on 120B-class models. Good if you live in the CUDA ecosystem.

AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 (~$3,000 in a mini PC): 128 GB unified memory, competitive decode speeds, strong on MoE models — Qwen 3 30B A3B runs at 72 tokens/second. The cheapest path to serious local memory.

To recap: the cost for running local, private AI models, on your own hardware is between $3000 and $10,000. Depending on how much you make with your AI setup, you could make back the initial investment in one, two years. From there onwards is pure profit.

The Open Source Models Are Actually Good Now

A year ago, running local AI models meant accepting a real quality gap. That gap is mostly gone. Here are 3 options that are probably covering 90% of the use cases:

Kimi K2 (Moonshot AI): One trillion parameters, 32B active per token. MoE, trained on 15.5 trillion tokens. SWE-bench Verified at 65.8% — better than most closed models on agentic coding tasks. Open weight under a modified MIT license, on HuggingFace.

GLM-5.2 (Zhipu AI): Released June 13, 2026 — two days after the Fable shutdown. One million token context window, which means you can load an entire mid-sized codebase in a single pass. Two thinking modes: High for speed, Max for hard problems. MIT licensed, open weights. No benchmark numbers at launch, which is unusual — but the prior GLM-5 scored 77.8 on SWE-bench Verified, so the baseline is solid.

MiniMax M3 (MiniMax): Released June 1, 2026. 428B total parameters, 23B active per token, one million token context. Ranked #1 out of 90 models on Artificial Analysis’s independent intelligence benchmark. SWE-Bench Pro at 59.0% (vendor-reported). Weights are on HuggingFace, though the license isn’t MIT — commercial use is free if your company makes under $20M/year, otherwise you need written permission. Worth knowing before you ship a product on top of it.

To recap: you get to play with 32B up to 428B parameters on your own machine, at decent speed, with intelligent tool calling. Your own little digital workshop, made entirely off of local, private AI models. It’s also worth adding that the pace of innovation in this area is still breathtaking, so what we talk about now might be obsoleted by even better models in 3 months.

Running Private, Local AI Models Is Not Optional Anymore

The Fable shutdown won’t be the last one. Governments are figuring out that model capabilities are geopolitically sensitive. Providers are figuring out that compliance isn’t optional – and there are already early signs that KYC is coming. Your access to the tools you depend on sits somewhere in the middle — renegotiable at any time, by people who aren’t you, and who probably don’t have the same goals with you.

Running your own local AI models isn’t paranoia. It’s actually a symptom of awareness: the world is moving fast, so you need to stay on top of it. We are on the verge of turning the users of commercial AI into the actual product – you, your train of thoughts, your data will be sold. In the same way this happened with social media.

If you’re ok with that, no problem. But if you care about your privacy, your algorithmic reality choice, and your sovereignty, then, by all means, start building your own local, private AI model factory.

Your future self will thank you.