It does very much appear to be just chrome, you guys actually just suck at reading.
Straight up what the article says:
"Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed [1]. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched.
This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it."
Note the part where it says that two weeks ago it covered Anthropic doing a similar thing with Chromium browsers if you used its app, now Google is doing a somewhat similar thing where Chrome automatically installs an AI model file. No where does it say that all Chromium based browsers do this automatically.
Stop skimming articles, assuming you know what they say, and spreading misinfo.
But do use Firefox or a derivative anyways, its much better over here
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