Dumb down your Mac: Save 12GB by removing Apple Intelligence

Mac users who don’t want Apple Intelligence to take up precious drive space can free up capacity thanks to a new command-line tool.

Apple Intelligence is generally a good set of features for Apple’s ecosystem of devices. However, not everyone particularly wants to use it.

That is especially a problem for Mac users with small drives and constrained spare capacity. For those stuck with a 256GB SSD, recovering 12GB can be extremely useful.

While the answer for this particular segment of Mac users would be to uninstall or remove Apple Intelligence, it’s not that simple.

Under macOS 27, there’s no option to turn off Apple Intelligence at all. You can turn off Siri, but there’s no single point in the menu to disable Apple Intelligence completely.

Even if you manage to disable Apple Intelligence, there’s still data hanging around and no direct option to remove it. There are about 12 gigabytes of models that Apple Intelligence relies on, and that’s storage users could find other uses for, if they were allowed to delete it.

Without a single Apple-sanctioned option to remove AI in the Settings, Mac users will have to look elsewhere for a solution.

RemoveMacAI

A project by Om Lahore called RemoveMacAI aims to clean up your Mac of Apple Intelligence. It’s a free project, released on GitHub under the MIT license.

RemoveMacAI is a script that installs a configuration profile to disable Apple Intelligence features on a Mac. That includes features like Siri AI, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, and more.

As well as disabling features, it also removes the Apple Intelligence foundation models, as well as those for image generation, Spatial Photos, Photos Clean Up, and Xcode code completion.

The script’s configuration profile works on restriction keys for Apple Intelligence, as well as for settings that don’t have a restriction key. The models are removed using Apple’s asset service, with System Integrity Protection enabled and System files kept intact.

Once deleted, the profile also redirects attempts to download each removed model to a closed local port. This prevents macOS from redownloading the models again.

However, you can remove the configuration profile to restore previous settings and allow the models to redownload.

How to use RemoveMacAI

AppleInsider recommends that users check out the project and ensure they are aware of what RemoveMacAI does before running it.

While there are a few ways to run RemoveMacAI, the easiest is from a single line, pasted into Terminal. At the time of publication, that line is:

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

Ran in Terminal, it downloads RemoveMacAI to a temporary folder and automatically runs. It shows how many features are active, how much storage space the models consume, and warns you about what happens if you proceed further.

At the prompt to "Turn Apple Intelligence off? [Y/N]" type Y, then enter.

A Device Management pop-up will appear, asking if you want to install the configuration profile. Click Install, and the script will continue to delete the models.

To revert the process, use this similar line in Terminal:

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