Or did you just give it away?

Google Chrome has been quietly stuffing a 4GB artificial intelligence model onto the drives of some users. No prompt. No permission slip. Just there.

It’s called Gemini Nano. It doesn’t live in the cloud, which means it lives on your laptop or phone. You don’t see it downloading. You don’t get a notification. You just find, one day, that your storage has shrunk.

Alexander Hanff—a Swedish computer scientist who goes by That Privacy Guy —found the trace. He noted that the file installs itself if your hardware can handle it. No one knows how many of us are hosting it right now.

The model isn’t useless, I guess. It spots scam calls. Summarizes meeting recordings. Helps write text messages. But it isn’t the “AI Mode” button in your address bar. That sends your data to Google servers. Gemini Nano works right on the silicon in front of you.

A Google spokesperson claimed the model vanishes if your device runs out of room.

“In February, we began rolling out the way for users to turn it off,” the statement read.

Convenient, for them.

Running inference on users’ own hardware pushes compute costs out of Google’s pocket. Into yours.

That is the deal, apparently. They get the features; you get the bill for the electricity and the disk space. Hanff thinks it might even break laws. Specifically, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. He argues that hiding the installation violates fairness and transparency. He also suggests it dodges reporting requirements under sustainability directives, mostly because AI eats power.

“Do they trust you?” Hanff asked CNET, rhetorically, of course. No one trusts them. He believes they skipped the permission box because asking would slow them down.

So you are hosting their AI. Whether you wanted to or not.

How to evict the model

You can’t see the file in a standard folder search. Chrome hides it well.

On Mac

  1. Open Finder.
  2. Hold the Option key while clicking Go in the menu bar.
  3. Select Library.
  4. Go to Application Support > Google > Chrome > Default.
  5. Look for a folder named OptGuideOnDeviceModel.

If it exists and holds a file called weights.bin, the model is on your drive. To kill it: open Chrome, go to Settings > System, and toggle On-device AI to off.

On Windows

Open the Run command (Win + R ). Paste this in: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome>User Data\OptGuideOnDeviceModel

Look for weights.bin. Found it? Then you have it.

Removing it takes more steps than it should.

  1. Open Chrome settings. Turn off On-device AI.
  2. Type chrome://flags in the address bar. Search for Optimization Guide. Disable “Enables Optimization Guide on Device”.
  3. Exit Chrome properly. Don’t just click the X. Use the menu. Quit.
  4. Go back to your file system. Delete the OptGuideOnDeviceModel folder entirely.

Done.

Or are you?

Hanff worries this is just the beginning. Once they move the workload off their servers, why stop at 4GB? Why ask permission when the software is already there, waiting in the shadows, ready to wake up and eat your resources?

The switch is off. But the habit is formed. And habits, in code, are hard to break.

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