So i see this alot and i understand it but at least in my country (canada) i have been torrenting for well over 15 years with out a vpn. The worst case is a 5k fine total but not before a letter from the isp forwarded to me on behalf of the copyright holder. Which i can ignore with out any issue since they have no idea who i am.
Issues will arise if you reply to them.
So is vpn required?
it depends on where you live and your confort with your risk.
I recommend Ollama, its easy to setup and the cli can download and run llms. With some more techsavviness you can get openwebui as a nice ui.
https://ollama.com/ https://openwebui.com/