Chrome silently downloads a 4GB AI model. Here’s how to remove it
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
In summary:
- PCWorld has discovered that Google Chrome is silently downloading a 4GB AI model called Gemini Nano onto users’ computers without explicit consent.
- This AI model provides local features such as text summarization and scam warnings, but consumes significant storage space on devices.
- Users can permanently delete the file by disabling “On-device AI” in Chrome’s system settings. Detailed instructions are provided below.
Google’s Chrome browser is already a notorious storage monopoly, but now we’re learning that it’s clogging up our PC drives in a new way: with a local AI model. This model, spotted by That Privacy Guy, downloads silently to your PC or Mac when you install Chrome, and eats up 4GB of storage space.
Spoiler alert: yes, you can delete the file and I’ll show you how. But first, some details about what’s going on.
The specific file is called weight.bin. On my Mac, I found it in Chrome’s Applications Support folder in Finder:
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/OptGuideOnDevice Model/
Windows users will find the file in the AppData directory:
C:\Users\
\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\OptGuideOnDeviceModel\
To access the AppData directory, press Windows Key + R, type %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\ directly in the dialog box, then press Enter.
On my Mac, the weights.bin file took up 4.27 GB of storage. If you delete the file, Chrome will simply reinstall it as soon as possible.
So, what exactly is Weights.bin and what does it do?
As That Privacy Guy notes, this file includes the “weights” for Gemini Nano, the local AI model that resides in Google’s Chrome browser. Unlike Gemini in the cloud, Nano installs directly on your PC and performs various AI tasks directly on your system.
Some of the local AI tasks that Gemini Nano can handle include summarizing the web pages you visit, organizing your Chrome tabs, warning you of online scams, and offering writing help or rephrasing text as you type, according to a Google support page.
Having a local AI model on your computer provides a number of benefits depending on the task, including lower latency and potentially greater privacy (although Chrome may still share at least some of your browser activity with Google HQ).
But local models also take up a lot of storage space. The Gemini Nano’s 4GB footprint is actually not bad when it comes to smaller local models: the 31 billion parameter version of Google’s Gemma 4 takes up 20GB of storage, for example, while the 128 billion parameter Mistral Medium hogs 80GB of space.
Again, simply deleting the weights.bin file will not work, as Chrome will automatically reinstall the missing file. But you can remove the 4GB download another way: by changing a single Chrome setting. Simply go to Settings > System, then turn off the “On-Device AI” setting. When I did this on my Mac, the weights.bin file immediately disappeared.
Of course, disabling Chrome’s local AI setting removed Chrome’s local AI functionality, including text suggestions and scam warnings.
As for Chrome quietly installing the local AI model on your system, it’s a hot topic of debate. For his part, The Privacy Guy criticizes Google for dropping the file on users’ PCs without a consent dialogue – and he is right.
However, in the future we will see more and more desktop applications downloading local AI models to our systems, for better or worse.
