Apple’s attempt to integrate AI into its various operating systems hasn’t been entirely well received, nor has the decision to make Apple Intelligence increasingly difficult to disable completely. Thankfully, the open source community has come to the rescue.

A recently released open source tool called RemoveMacAI does pretty much exactly what it says on the GitHub-hosted tin: Aggressively rips Apple Intelligence out of macOS, disabling most of its AI features and removing downloaded models following the launch of macOS 27 last month.

Siri AI? Gone. ChatGPT and other AI extensions? Eliminated. Genmoji, random boxes offering to jazz up your writing, summaries of notifications and app content, and automatic photo clean-up? Never to be seen again. 

More importantly, RemoveMacAI can claw back the storage occupied by Apple’s AI models - potentially over 12 GB, depending on the Mac. You might just get confused and think it’s 2025 again.

The impetus for RemoveMacAI, its creator Om Lahorey said in a LinkedIn post, is the fact that Apple made it practically impossible to remove Apple Intelligence features in macOS 27.

“The settings are spread across about a dozen places, some of them only under Screen Time,” Lahorey wrote over the weekend. “Even with every one turned off, the models stay on disk. I wanted it gone in one step, so I wrote RemoveMacAI.” 

Unsurprisingly, Lahorey’s tool blew up on Hacker News, with plenty of people happy for an easy way to get rid of Apple AI tools. As of writing, the repo has over 1,500 stars, so it's clearly struck a nerve with frustrated macOS users. 

It’s simple to run, as its GitHub page explains: install it via a curl command to its GitHub repo, or with Homebrew, and then fire it up in the terminal. Selected features can be left enabled, or Apple Intelligence can be disabled completely, while a single command can revert the changes and restore the previous settings.

RemoveMacAI works by installing a configuration profile, which the user has to approve, that applies Apple’s own restriction keys for Apple Intelligence features. Models are then removed via Apple’s asset service. Lahorey credits another open source tool called pared, and its developer, with mapping the asset service, model sets, and settings keys needed to remove Apple Intelligence. Pared functions similarly to RemoveMacAI – you can consider RemoveMacAI to be a more user-friendly wrapper for the other tool. 

As for whether it will persist, Lahorey explains that the config profile RemoveMacAI installs redirects the download for Apple Intelligence models to a closed local port, so updates to macOS shouldn’t result in the models being reinstalled. 

Also worth mentioning, Apple System Integrity Protection remains enabled with the models disabled and uninstalled, as no files under System are directly modified by the tool. Dictation should still work as well, as speech models aren’t removed by RemoveMacAI. 

That said, it’s certainly possible a future macOS update will break RemoveMacAI’s functionality. So if you’re interested in giving the tool a shot, there’s no guarantee this particular escape hatch will remain open forever. ®