Here’s how I finally got Google’s uninvited 4GB AI model off my Mac

My 2020 M1 Mac Book Air still runs well, but conserving hard drive space as years of files, media, and software accumulate is a continual challenge. So I was miffed when I read security researcher Alexander Hanff’s May 4 report that Google Chrome has been automatically downloading an over-4GB AI model called Gemini Nano onto everyone’s computer, without asking for consent or providing notification. Chrome is not my main browser (I’m a Firefox diehard), and Gemini is not my main AI (that would be Claude). I’m paying a hefty hard-drive tax for something I don’t use. Simply deleting the file, called weights.bin, is useless. Chrome just downloads it again. And most of the advice on how to get around that doesn’t work—at least in my extensive testing. A lot of what I discuss here applies to both Macs and PCs, but the techiest advice is for Macs, as that’s where it’s been most studied and where I was best able to test it. Google added Gemini Nano in version 126 of Chrome, released in June 2024. But Hanff’s extensive forensic reporting of how it operates on a Mac brought the issue center stage this week, spawning a raft of tech advice articles. In response, Google issued a short statement saying that, in fact, there is a simple toggle in Chrome to disable and remove Gemini Nano. None of that advice may actually work on your system. Gemini Nano is designed to speed up in-browser AI features such as improving writing and editing by running jobs on your computer, rather than sending your data to Google’s cloud. You may find this useful, and be happy to keep Gemini Nano installed. But if you do want to ditch it, you may have to take more complicated steps than what Google and the press have been telling you. What didn’t work A statement Google sent to me and the rest of the media, reads, in part: “In February, we began rolling out the ability for users to easily turn off and remove the model directly in Chr