Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer
AI + ML
You did remember to opt out of AI, didn't you?
Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space from your computer for its local large language model unless you opted out.
It's calledweights.bin and it's stored in a folder calledOptGuideOnDeviceModel. What's more, if you track down thefile and delete it, Chrome will download a fresh copy and reinstateit.
The discovery was announced this week by Alexander Hanff, who blogsas "the Privacy Guy," in a somewhat sensationally titled blog post: GoogleChrome 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 hasbeen doing this for quite some time. In April 2025, this Redditpost suggests the model was "just" 3 GB, but a StackOverflow questionsays that by November 2025 it was already up to4...
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