Your Android phone may hold up to 7 GB of AI models. Here's how to turn them off with ADB

Android phones now ship with on-device AI that downloads its models in the background. The biggest one is AICore, the service that runs Gemini Nano. Google's own support page says it normally takes about 7 GB on a Pixel, and 11 GB or more while a model update is in progress, because the old and new model are kept side by side for a few days. Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola and OnePlus add their own AI engines on top.

If you never use those features, that is a lot of storage. This post shows how to see what's there and turn it off without root, and introduces a small open-source tool I wrote that does it from the browser: RemoveAndroidAI.

What's on the phone

With USB debugging on (Settings → About phone → tap Build number 7 times → Developer options → USB debugging) and platform-tools installed:

adb shell pm list packages --user 0 | grep -iE 'aicore|bard|bixby|intelligence'
adb shell df -k /data

The usual suspects:

Turning a package off

adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.aicore
adb shell pm clear --user 0 com.google.android.aicore   # deletes its downloaded data

pm disable-user is the same switch as Settings → Apps → Disable. It does not free space by itself: the package keeps its data. pm clear deletes that data, which is where the models live. To undo:

adb shell pm enable --user 0 com.google.android.aicore

The app downloads its models again when it needs them.

The part that bites: side effects

Not every "AI" package is only AI. Three things I learned while building the list:

• com.google.android.as (Android System Intelligence) also powers Live Caption, smart text selection, app predictions and smart replies. Turning it off costs you those.
• com.android.settings.intelligence sounds like AI but is the Settings search. Disable it and Settings crashes when you search.
• com.samsung.android.honeyboard is the Samsung keyboard, which hosts Writing Assist. Disabling it can leave you stuck at the lock screen with no keyboard to type your PIN.

And pm itself protects nothing. On an Android 16 emulator, pm disable-user --user 0 android happily disabled the core system package. Any tool in this space has to carry its own safety list.

RemoveAndroidAI

So I put that list in one place, with a source for every package, and wrapped it in a tool:

• In the browser: open the web app in Chrome, Edge, Brave or Opera, click Connect phone, tap Allow on the phone. It talks to the phone over WebUSB using Tango (ya-webadb). There's no backend and nothing is uploaded.
• From a terminal: npx github:maximilianfeix/RemoveAndroidAI scans and changes nothing. Add --apply to turn things off and --undo to put them back.

Each package has a tier:

• safe: only AI features stop. These are pre-selected.
• caution: other features stop too, or the side effects aren't verified yet.
• never: listed so they can't be removed by mistake. The engine refuses them.

Every change goes into an undo record, and free space is measured with df before and after, so the number it shows is what you actually got back. The package list is cross-checked against UAD-ng, which is the tool to reach for if you want to debloat more than AI.

Status

It's v0.1. The command handling is tested against an Android 16 emulator and a simulated phone, but not yet on many real devices. If you try it, I'd love an issue with your phone model, Android version, how much space came back and anything that stopped working. That feedback is what moves packages from caution to safe.

Code (MIT): https://github.com/maximilianfeix/RemoveAndroidAI