How to Prevent Chrome Browser from Downloading 4GB of Local AI Model Files

If you’re a Mac user of the Chrome web browser, as many are, you might be interested to know that the latest versions of Chrome default to downloading a large local Gemini AI model that can take up around 4GB of storage space.

While some users may appreciate and use the local Chrome Gemini AI model, which is used for things like autofill suggestions, scam detection, web page summaries, and writing tools, other users may find it either unnecessary because they don’t use AI, use another AI agent like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, a local model like LLama, or perhaps because they already have Apple Intelligence on their Mac to perform similar tasks.

We’ll show you how to stop the Google Chrome browser form downloading a large local AI model on your Mac (and this applies to Windows too if you have a PC using Chrome too).

How to Stop Chrome from Downloading Local AI Files

Disabling the on-device AI model is easy:

1. From the Chrome browser, go to the following Chrome setting section via URL:

chrome://settings/system

2. Toggle the switch for “On-device AI” to OFF

How to Delete Chrome On-Device AI Model from Mac

Next you might wish to see if the local AI model has already been downloaded, which you can check by doing the following:

1. From the Finder, go to the “Go” menu and choose “Go To Folder” and enter the following path:

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/

2. Hit Go/enter and look for a folder named “OptGuideOnDeviceModel”, if it exists and you wish to remove it simply drag that to the Trash and empty

Whether you’re turning these features off in Chrome because you already use a different AI model, you want to reclaim storage capacity, or perhaps because you don’t use AI at all, you might also be interested in disabling Apple Intelligence on your device, and by doing so you can recover 7GB of disk space by ditching Apple Intelligence. Personally, I mostly use Claude and ChatGPT through their respective client apps, so I don’t wish to have additional AI models stored locally on my Mac.

You can learn more about the Google local on-device AI features here at support.google.com if you’re interested.