Overview
- RemoveMacAI was published on GitHub over the weekend of Oct. 4–5 and quickly spread across Mac forums and tech sites as a way to reclaim local storage used by Apple Intelligence.
- The tool turns off Apple Intelligence features, uses an approved configuration profile to invoke Apple restriction keys, and asks the user in System Settings to approve the profile before removing models through Apple’s asset service.
- Typical reclaimed space is about 10–12 GB but some users report much larger recoveries; the tool includes a dry‑run mode, a --keep flag to preserve specific features, and a revert command to restore settings and allow models to redownload.
- Removing the models disables many on‑device features—Siri/Hey Siri, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension, summaries, Mail smart replies, inline predictions, Photos Clean Up, Spatial Photos, and Xcode predictive completion.
- The project is MIT‑licensed, open source and installable via a one‑line curl or Homebrew, yet it relies on restriction keys partially deprecated in macOS 26.4 so its blocking method may stop working with future macOS updates.