Google Chrome silently downloading a 4GB AI model (weight.bin) to every user profile filling SSDs

[Jaan]

Hi everyone,

 

Not sure if this is old news, but we recently ran into a massive disk space crisis across our client machines. Cumulative Updates started failing, and we were getting flooded with low disk space alerts.

 

We have small 240GB SSDs on our machines, but we've never had a space issue until now because we use a "Delete user profiles older than X days" GPO. However, when I went down the rabbit hole to see what was eating up the drives, I found a massive weight.bin file tucked away inside the AppData folder of almost every single student profile.

 

Because this is a shared environment, some PCs had up to 50 different student profiles on them—each with its own 4GB weight.bin file. That's 200GB of completely wasted space on a single machine!

 

To make matters worse, the folder path where Google is burying this file is so long that it's hitting Windows character limits, which seems to be breaking our profile deletion GPOs and PDQ cleanup scripts.

 

For reference, this seems to be related to Chrome's built-in Gemini/AI features ("Optimization Guide" or "Optimization Targets"). There are a few threads popping up about this "naughty" behavior online:

 

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_uYSqdIVM0

• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/1t58qu2/why_is_google_chrome_downloading_a_4gb_ai_file_to/

• Medium: https://medium.com/@sathishkraju/chrome-quietly-installed-a-4-gb-ai-model-on-your-computer-you-didnt-ask-you-can-t-keep-it-off-75ce6e305b17

• Google Support: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/431316465/why-does-google-chrome-install-4gb-ai-on-my-pc-without-asking?hl=en-GB

•  

My questions for the community:

1. Has anyone else hit this issue in a shared/educational environment?

2. Can I safely nuke these files via a script without breaking Chrome entirely?

3. Most importantly, how do we block Chrome from downloading this model via GPO? (I've looked into disabling the "Optimization Guide" or Gemini features, but wanted to see if anyone has a verified, working registry fix or ADMX policy).

 

Any advice or shared pain would be greatly appreciated!

 

Here's a screenshot of the location in question.

[russlp]

We've set this GPO Using the latest policies:

 

Computer Configuration > Google/Google Chrome > Generative AI > Settings for GenAI local foundational model

Set to Enabled and then Do not download model.

 

Seems to work and not caused any issues that we know of.

 

Edited June 22 by russlp

[dhicks]

14 minutes ago, Jaan said:

Has anyone else hit this issue in a shared/educational environment?

Can I safely nuke these files via a script without breaking Chrome entirely?

 

Yes, we had the same issue on our MacOS devices - each pupil user profile downloaded a separate local version of the files. A quick check with Google / Gemini produced a solution, I think for MacOS (managed with Moysle) we had to create a custom settings file, similar to a Windows GPO but the MacOS version.

 

We also found that we could simply delete the folder with no adverse effect, although Chrome does simply re-download the files if it has the chance. Handy for a quick fix if your drive is really full, and can be done with a boot / login script if needed.

[jthompson]

Haven't observed Chrome doing this here. Maybe our computers are too poor to qualify for it?

[jtotheb]

1 hour ago, Jaan said:

working registry fix

If you haven't got fairly current ADMX installed you can also do it via a reg key

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome

Value: GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings

DWORD

1

 

Then in chrome://settings/system you will see On-device AI is disabled and showing as a managed policy.