Remove Apple Intelligence from MacOS 27 Golden Gate with RemoveMacAI
If you don’t use Apple Intelligence and Siri AI capabilities on your Mac, and you’re comfortable with Terminal-based third party removal tools, you might be interested in disabling and removing Apple Intelligence, Siri AI, Siri, and all related tools from your Mac with a newly popular utility.
A third party open source tool called RemoveMacAI promises to do just that, and will completely turn off all of the following Apple Intelligence features; Siri, Hey Siri, Siri menu bar icon, Writing Tools (including “Write with Siri”, which we recently discussed how to turn off), Genmoji, Image Playground, ChatGPT, Apple Intelligence summaries in Mail, Messages, Safari, Notes, Notifications, smart replies, text predictions, spatial photos, photos AI features including Clean Up, and Xcode predictive completion. RemoveMacAI also removes the Apple Intelligence on-device models including the foundation model. The end result is that you might recover a bit of disk space, as well as completely disable all of these features.
With MacOS and System Data frequently bloating into multiple hundreds of GB that is weirdly difficult to slim down, it’s no surprise that users are turning to just about anything they can to try and recover disk space. But removing Apple Intelligence will only recover around 7GB-12GB (if that, some users have reported that RemoveMacAI doesn’t actually recover any disk storage for them as the Apple Intelligence space transfers into the ever-expanding black hole of “System Data”). So if recovering some storage capacity is your interest in this tool, perhaps don’t expect much on that side of things.
Assuming you are comfortable with the command line, and running third party open source software that tweaks the MacOS system, the RemoveMacAI tool is available on Github and through HomeBrew, and you can check out the project and steps to install it with the developer link below:
Using tools of this nature are very much at user discretion and really only appropriate for advanced users who not only feel comfortable in the command line, but feel comfortable modifying MacOS with third party tools. It’s a bit of a shame that this is the only approach to disable Apple Intelligence in MacOS 27 Golden Gate, particularly because disabling Apple Intelligence was a Settings toggle on prior MacOS versions (and iOS/iPadOS for that matter), but that settings toggle is no longer available in the latest OS 27 versions of system software. Hopefully that will change in the near future.
Under the “How it Works” section of the RemoveMacAI GitHub page, you’ll find the following explanations of what the tool is doing and how it accomplishes it’s disabling and removing of Apple Intelligence:
A configuration profile applies Apple’s restriction keys for Apple Intelligence and forces the settings that have no restriction key.
Models are removed through Apple’s asset service. System Integrity Protection stays enabled and no files under /System are modified directly.
The profile redirects the download of each removed model to a closed local port, so macOS does not download it again.
Removing the profile restores the previous settings. macOS downloads the models again when a feature needs them.
RemoveMacAI makes no network requests and collects no data.
This little utility has generated quite a bit of attention throughout the Apple world, with even DaringFireball covering the tool. That inevitably means it has been put on Apple’s radar, so perhaps we will see a return of the System Settings toggle for Apple Intelligence in a future system software update. In the meantime, it’s up to you to determine if using this utility is right for you and your Mac.
