~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/2025.8.11.1/ is the folder.
Within it is a weights.bin that's 4GB.
Will I break anything if I delete that?
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4Out of curiosity, did you ever opted-in / allowed Google Chrome to use built-in AI features and use 4 GB of storage?A.L– A.L2025-11-21 12:20:41 +00:00Commented 19 hours ago
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2 Answers
I don't think your answer to your question makes it go away completely at all. It'll definitely come back once you upgrade. The date subfolder it's in suggests it might even be redownloaded more often.
To get rid of it properly, for Windows there's a Chrome policy that can be modified - GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings - to value 1 in registry or Do not download model in gpedit. I don't know about macOS equivalent, but it should be a policy with the same name in theory.
I also founds mentions of bunch of various flags you can potentially disable to turn the whole feature off, e.g. chrome://flags/#optimization-guide-on-device-model - but I've seen at least 5 other ones mentioned in several sources, with various people claiming for each that they don't work, so yeah - I don't have this file and won't risk enabling anything to test it to avoid AI nonsense on my device.
This file is the Gemini Nano that powers the Built-in AI features.
It's used by web APIs like the Prompt API, Translator API, Summarizer API, and sometimes Chrome DevTools.
Yes, according to my own experiments, you can delete the weights.bin file or the OptGuideOnDeviceModel folder. Chrome won't fatally break, but anything relating to Built-in AI will be kinda broken (probably) until you restart the browser.
There's some good developer docs at https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
If you want to go nerdy: You can open up chrome://on-device-internals/ and hit "Load Default" and do inference directly with the model.
