RemoveMacAI Strips Apple Intelligence from macOS 27, Frees 12 GB

macOS 27 shipped without a switch to turn off Apple Intelligence, and the on-device models sit on disk at about 12 GB whether or not a user ever asks for them. Help Net Security reports that a developer has released RemoveMacAI, a free MIT-licensed command-line tool that "turns off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and deletes about 12 GB of downloaded AI models" on Apple-silicon Macs, and blocks them from coming back.

The tool installs through a curl script or Homebrew. It prints what is currently on, asks for confirmation, and opens System Settings so the user can approve a configuration profile. The profile applies Apple's own restriction keys and sends each removed model's download to a closed local port, "so the fetch fails." System Integrity Protection stays on, and nothing under /System is modified directly. A dry-run mode previews the change, and a flag lets a user keep specific features.

The list of what goes off is long: Siri including "Hey Siri" and the menu bar icon, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension, summaries in Mail, Messages, Safari, Notes and notifications, Mail smart replies, inline text predictions, Spatial Photos, Photos Clean Up, and Xcode code completion. Apps that call Apple's Foundation Models framework lose that ability, as does the Use Model action in Shortcuts. Visual Intelligence and natural-language editing in Calendar go too. Dictation keeps working on its own speech models.

One quirk persists. "A process named Siri will still show up in your process list. In macOS 27 the Spotlight window runs under that name."

"The tool makes no network requests and collects no data," the developer says, and the code is readable before the curl pipe runs. One revert command restores the previous settings, and macOS re-downloads the models the next time a feature calls for them. The release lands in the same macOS cycle where Apple is itself tightening Full Disk Access against AI agents, and in a week already dense with MIT-licensed Mac AI utilities coming out of the open-source side.