Thanks, Ollama.

Its all local. Ollama is the application, deepseek and llama and qwen and whatever else are just model weights. The models arent executables, nor do the models ping external services or whatever. The models are safe. Ollama itself is meant for hosting models locally, and I dont believe it even has capability of doing anything besides run local models.

Where it gets more complicated is "agentic" assistants, that can read files or execute things at the terminal. The most advanced code assistance are doing this. But this is NOT a function of ollama or the model, its a function of the chat UI or code editor plugin that glues the model output together with a web search, filesystem, terminal session, etc.

So in short, ollama just runs models. Its all local and private, no worries.

Use docker if you want peace of mind

It's a good question. Older model formats used to allow for executable code to be present and thus would present a security risk. But with the formats that Ollama and Llama.cpp use I believe that's not the case anymore.

ollama downloads the model from the original source afaik, so there's not really any risk. the model itself can't do anything bad but I do not know if there could be malware added through the loading process. I remember there being big problems with pickle files for stable diffusion or something, though that's been fixed with safetensor afaik.

Nah, you’re safe to run it locally. You’re downloading the specific model, that’s right, and it’s not an exe. As you ask questions of it, the inference step, that is sent directly to the model on your machine by the ollama interface. Nothing goes over the network after you download a model and there is no scanning involved; that’s just not how it works.