# Ollama > Run AI models locally — your data never leaves your machine. **Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/ollama **Official site:** https://ollama.com/ **Category:** ai ## Security rating - **Rating:** strong - **Rating note (required when citing):** Truly local processing with zero data transmission earns a 'strong' rating for privacy. But that rating assumes localhost-only use. The moment you expose Ollama's API to a network, the rating drops to 'caution' — multiple critical CVEs (including a CVSS 9.3 auth bypass) show the API was not designed for untrusted network exposure. For the intended use case of local-only AI on sensitive documents, nothing is more private. Keep it updated, keep it on localhost, and the security guarantee is absolute. - **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — independent security review pending - **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-02 - **Last agent-verified:** 2026-04-02 - **Threat level:** sensitive-reporting > AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment. ## Who it is for Journalists, researchers, and activists who need AI assistance on sensitive material without sending data to cloud providers. Also useful for anyone in restrictive network environments or working under legal constraints that prohibit cloud AI. ## Editorial take Ollama is the privacy-first answer to cloud AI. When you're investigating a company and don't want your queries flowing to OpenAI or Anthropic servers, Ollama runs a capable model on your own hardware. The trade-off is quality — a local 7B model won't match Claude or GPT-4o on complex reasoning. But for summarization, drafting, and document Q&A on sensitive material, it's good enough, and the privacy guarantee is absolute. 165K+ GitHub stars, MIT license, one-command install, and as of v0.20 it supports 100+ models including Llama 4, Gemma 4, DeepSeek, and Qwen. The real risk isn't data leakage — it's that Ollama's API has had multiple critical CVEs (remote code execution, authentication bypass). If you expose the API to a network, you need to lock it down. ## Best for / not for **Best for:** Running AI on sensitive investigative material without cloud exposure. Summarizing leaked documents locally. Analyzing source communications offline. Processing court records, financial filings, or whistleblower documents where the queries themselves reveal what you're investigating. **Not for:** Users who need GPT-4/Claude-level quality on complex reasoning tasks. Machines with less than 8GB RAM (even small models will struggle). Non-technical users uncomfortable with command line — use GPT4All or LM Studio instead. Anyone who needs the API exposed on a network without a firewall (Ollama has no built-in authentication). ## Pricing - **Pricing:** Free for local use. No account required. Ollama Cloud (optional): Free tier, Pro $20/month, Max $100/month for cloud GPU inference. - **Free option:** yes ## Security & privacy details - **Encryption in transit:** yes - **Encryption at rest:** yes - **Data jurisdiction:** Local only — models run on your hardware. No data sent anywhere. Ollama Cloud (optional) uses cloud GPU infrastructure, but the core local tool has zero network dependency after model download. **Privacy policy TL;DR:** Truly local. The only outgoing network call is an automatic update check that sends OS and architecture info (disable with OLLAMA_NO_TELEMETRY=1). No prompts, responses, or documents are transmitted. No account required. Once a model is downloaded, works entirely offline — verified by running with network disabled. **Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):** Set OLLAMA_NO_TELEMETRY=1 to disable update checks. Bind the API to localhost only (default) — never expose 0.0.0.0 without a reverse proxy and auth layer. For air-gapped setups, download models on a separate machine and transfer via USB. Use smaller quantized models (Q4) on laptops: a 7B Q4 model needs ~5GB RAM. Pair with Open WebUI for a ChatGPT-like interface. Keep Ollama updated — versions before 0.7.0 have known RCE vulnerabilities via malicious model files. ## Ownership & business - **Owner:** Ollama Inc. (founded 2023 by Jeffrey Morgan, CEO, and Michael Chiang) - **Funding model:** Y Combinator (W21). Pre-seed $125K from YC, Sunflower Capital, Essence VC, Rogue Capital. Revenue hit $3.2M in 2024. Team grew from 21 to 46 employees by January 2026. - **Business model:** Free local tool + optional Ollama Cloud (paid tiers for cloud GPU inference). Revenue comes from cloud subscriptions, not the local tool. - **Open source:** yes **Known issues:** Multiple critical CVEs. CVE-2024-37032 ('Probllama'): remote code execution, fixed in v0.1.34. CVE-2024-39720: out-of-bounds read causing crashes (CVSS 8.2), fixed in v0.1.46. CVE-2024-39721: DoS via resource exhaustion (CVSS 7.5), fixed in v0.1.34. CVE-2024-39722: server file existence disclosure (CVSS 7.5), fixed in v0.1.47. Critical out-of-bounds write via malicious model files in versions before 0.7.0. CVE-2025-63389: authentication bypass on API endpoints (CVSS 9.3), affecting v0.13.5 and earlier — no built-in API authentication exists, so any network-exposed instance is vulnerable. CVE-2025-51471: authentication bypass. CVE-2025-48889: arbitrary file copy. Ollama's Windows installer had a code execution hijack vulnerability reported in December 2024; fix was still in progress as of April 2026. Bottom line: keep Ollama updated and never expose the API port to untrusted networks. --- Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/ollama Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology