Get llama.cpp and try Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. Just came out and looks good. You’ll have to look into optimal settings, as it’s a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with only 3B parameters active. That means that the rest can stay in RAM for quick inference.

You could also try the dense model (Qwen3.5-27B), but that will be significantly slower. Put these in a coding harness like Oh-My-Pi, OpenCode, etc. and see how it fares for your tasks. Should be ok for small tasks, but don’t expect Opus / Sonnet 4.6 quality, more like better than Haiku.

There must be something that ensures the response is legitimate. Otherwise, if it’s client-side and fully offline, I can just spoof the app to return the response “Yes, over 18”. If it’s not the government doing the verification, it’s Google or Apple, which will give them access to all the “adult” websites you visit. Also, another reason for the EU to push for strict device attestation, without any DIY stuff (i.e., no more GrapheneOS, LineageOS, etc).

I couldn’t find a desktop app on the EU’s GitHub (another red flag, btw, using GitHub for this). All that seems to be available is code for the Android or iOS apps. Could you share it, if you can?

Even with the Zero Knowledge approach, you will still run an app on a phone (what if I don’t have one) that will make some call to the government’s servers, which will most likely know what website you’re trying to access. We’re moving the data mining from some third party to the government, which can be wrongly used later if some idiot comes into power. If it’s not making a call to a government’s servers, I would be surprised, since you could imagine someone just bypassing this to always return “Over 18”.

Even funnier (read “sad”), this initiative will probably rely on Google and Apple to keep it robust, and will likely have no availability on rooted phones or non-Google Play Services ones. It’s premature at best to deploy this in a meaningfully safe way.