how could running the qwen GGUF phone home? that would require cooperation with the inference backend (llama-cpp), or some kind of model exploit. It’d be far easier to pay the agent harness devs or supply-chain some plugin or something, that space is the Wild West anyways

I've certainly used these models without wifi without any differences.

You've used Qwen with model quantization, locally without internet connection.

A lot of people are purchasing access via Alibaba Cloud directly, or indirectly by companies which host the model.