'Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer'
Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space from your computer for its local large language model unless you opted out.
It's called weights.bin and it's stored in a folder called OptGuideOnDeviceModel. What's more, if you track down the file and delete it, Chrome will download a fresh copy and reinstate it.
The discovery was announced this week by Alexander Hanff, who blogs as "the Privacy Guy," in a somewhat sensationally titled blog post: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
It doesn't seem to be new, though: there are signs that Chrome has been doing this for quite some time. In April 2025, this Reddit post suggests the model was "just" 3 GB, but a Stack Overflow question says that by November 2025 it was already up to 4 GB. We would not be at all surprised if soon it went to five.
...
If you didn't opt out, Google has some info on how to disable it. In brief: in Chrome's address box, enter the special URL chrome://flags. In the resulting page, look for an entry named optimization-guide-on-device-model and set it to Disabled, then restart Chrome. The browser should then delete the weights.bin file.
In theory, you can also use your OS to block this – or deploy enterprise policies, if you're free to set your own. (With any luck, soon this will be part of the Just The Browser policy that we reported on in January.)
The Reddit post we linked above says that Windows users can set a Registry key. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome, create a DWORD key called GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings and set it to 1, then restart Chrome.
