Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking, Alexander Hanff writes.
Google Chrome is silently installing a 4GB AI model on each of our devices without consent, says Alexander Hanff, a prominent computer scientist and lawyer. According to him, that’s both illegal and extremely costly for the climate.
Hanff said on his blog he’s discovered that Chrome is “reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking.”
The file is named weights.bin, and it lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. Essentially, it’s the weights for Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device large language model.
Moreover, the file appeared with no consent prompt, Hanff says. There is no checkbox in Chrome Settings labeled “download a 4GB AI model.”
The download triggers when Chrome’s AI features are active, and, of course, those features are active by default in recent Chrome versions.
