You turned off Apple Intelligence. macOS kept the 12 GB anyway.

There's a small insult in how macOS 27 handles Apple Intelligence. You can't switch it off in one place anymore. Siri has its own settings, Writing Tools has its own, and so do Photos, Mail, Messages and Safari. Say you go through all of them and tick every box. The models that powered those features are still sitting on your drive, about 12 GB of them, doing nothing.

That's what RemoveMacAI is for. It's a small open-source command line tool written in Swift, and it does the boring job for you.

What it actually does

It does three things:

1. Turns the features off.

2. Deletes the downloaded models.

3. Stops macOS from quietly downloading them again.

All of it can be undone with one command.

The list of features it turns off is longer than you'd guess. It covers Siri (including "Hey Siri" and the menu bar icon), Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension, and the summaries in Mail, Messages, Safari, Notes and notifications. It also handles smart replies in Mail, inline text predictions, Spatial Photos, Clean Up in Photos, and predictive code completion in Xcode. Nobody is going to find all of those by hand, and nobody is going to remember to recheck them after an update.

The clever part is that it isn't hacky

When I hear "remove Apple's AI," I expect SIP disabled and files deleted from places they shouldn't be touched. This project does none of that.

It uses a configuration profile, the same mechanism companies use to manage employee Macs. The profile applies Apple's own restriction keys for Apple Intelligence and forces the few settings that don't have a key. The models get removed through Apple's own asset service. System Integrity Protection stays on, and nothing under /System is edited directly.

The no-redownload trick made me smile. The profile points each removed model's download at a closed local port. macOS goes to fetch the model, finds nobody home, and gives up. It's blunt, but it works without touching anything Apple would object to. And since it's all in the profile, macOS updates don't undo it.

Trying it

There's a one-line installer:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI/main/install.sh | bash

I know, piping curl into bash makes people twitch, and that's a healthy instinct. The script checks a SHA-256 checksum on the download and runs from a temporary directory, so nothing gets installed on your machine. If you'd still rather read it first, install.sh is sitting in the repo. Homebrew works too:

brew install omlahore/tap/removemacai
removemacai

The commands you'll use:

• removemacai status shows each feature and how much space the models take.

• removemacai off --dry-run shows what would change without changing anything. I'd run this first.

• removemacai off --keep <features> leaves specific features on. removemacai features lists the names it accepts.

• removemacai revert undoes everything.

When you run the tool for real, it shows the current state and asks you to confirm. Then it opens System Settings so you can approve the configuration profile. macOS makes you click that yourself, and I think that's the right call. A tool that could do this silently would be a much scarier tool.

What you give up

Apple Intelligence off means Apple Intelligence off, so some things stop working:

• Apps that rely on Apple's on-device models, including the Foundation Models framework and the Use Model action in Shortcuts.

• Visual Intelligence.

• Natural-language editing in Calendar.

Dictation keeps working, because it's a separate setting and its speech models stay put.

You may also spot a process called Siri still running afterward and assume the tool failed. It didn't. In macOS 27 the Spotlight window runs under that name, and a few system services stay loaded because SIP protects them.

Who it's for

You need macOS 27 on Apple silicon, so it's a narrow audience. But within that audience, I can think of a few kinds of people who'd want it. Some want the disk space back, especially on a 256 GB machine. Some don't want on-device AI features around on principle. Some just like knowing that "off" means off. The README says the tool makes no network requests and collects no data, which is the least you'd want from software like this.

The project credits pared for first documenting the asset service interface and several of the settings keys. That's a nice touch, and it's how this kind of tinkering is supposed to work.

My take

You can love Apple Intelligence or find it pointless, and either is fine. The part that bothers me is when a feature you've turned off still costs you 12 GB, and the only way to find out is to go looking. RemoveMacAI makes the choice clean in both directions. It removes everything, and if you change your mind, one command brings it back.

Repo: github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI