<![CDATA[If you are running Google Chrome on Windows and wish to disable the illicitly downloaded 4 GByte AI model, here are the steps to go though:]]>If you are running Google Chrome on Windows and wish to disable the illicitly downloaded 4 GByte AI model, here are the steps to go though:

  1. Disable AI Features (Prevention)

Deleting the file (weights.bin) is often ineffective as Chrome will automatically re-download it upon relaunch unless the associated AI features are disabled.

Standard Settings: In Chrome, Go to Settings > System and toggle off On-device GenAI (or "On-device AI") Experimental Flags:

Enter chrome://flags in your Chrome address bar and disable the following:

-guide-on-device-model
-api-for-gemini-nano

  1. Delete Local AI Model Files (Clean-up)

After disabling the flags, you can manually delete the storage-heavy folder to reclaim space (roughly 4GB).

Press Win + R and paste:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Open your profile folder (usually named Default).

Find and delete the OptGuideOnDeviceModel folder.

As an experiment I have deleted just the existing weights.bin file and re-created a read-only 0 byte version. I can then monitor this to see if it's changed in the future.

Hopefully this will disable these illicit AI features and prevent it from being re-enabled in future.

.bin

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/topic/6b990111-efbb-4001-87fa-2a539f990602/if-you-are-running-google-chrome-on-windows-and-wish-to-disable-the-illicitly-downloaded-4-gbyte-ai-model-here-are-the-steps-to-go-thoughRSS for NodeFri, 15 May 2026 04:41:01 GMTWed, 06 May 2026 13:02:43 GMT60