RemoveMacAI strips Apple Intelligence from macOS 27, frees 12GB

macOS 27 Golden Gate shipped without a toggle for Apple Intelligence. Ars Technica covered an unofficial command-line tool, RemoveMacAI, built by developer Om Lahore to do what the operating system no longer lets users do themselves: switch the AI off and delete the models it keeps on disk.

"It turns off Siri, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension, and all the summaries, then it deletes the models and stops macOS from downloading them again. Dictation still works because it's a separate setting," Lahore writes in a project description quoted by Daring Fireball.

Lahore reports the tool frees "about 12GB," though MacRumors notes some users have recovered more. The project avoids touching anything under /System, which keeps System Integrity Protection on. Help Net Security describes the method: "The profile applies Apple's own restriction keys and sends each removed model's download to a closed local port, so the fetch fails." The developer also says the tool "makes no network requests and collects no data," and the MIT-licensed code is on GitHub for inspection.

The operation is advertised as fully reversible. A revert command restores the prior settings, and macOS re-downloads the models the next time a feature calls for them.