Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

ponyous

The site is currently unavailable 503 so I can't read it. But I wonder, what should you consent to? Every dependency? Every dependency above 1GB?

tdeck

Somebody's promotion packet depended on pushing this through the approval process.

jacquesm

Not on my devices. Auto update has been abused so often now that it is an embarrassment to the industry. Auto update should be for bug fixes and security issues only.

dotcoma

Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?

DineshKruplani

it's so absurd at this point. isn't chrome already so much abused.

flanked-evergl

This is a bit disingenuous. If you install Chrome, you install Chrome and all it's parts. They don't ask your consent for individual parts because that would be absurd. If you don't want Chrome and all its parts, don't use it.

cubefox

I thought using local rather than cloud AI was pretty universally agreed to be good?

TheServitor

Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.

jve

> At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms. > For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (much of Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, most of Latin America), 4 GB of unrequested download is on the order of a month's data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user's behalf. Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered. THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/consents. However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.

pezgrande

If anything I am glad a bit of shift to local llm's. Their gemma4 is pretty powerful for such small model so I guess that's what they are delivering.

jbub

https://archive.ph/vhTfm

walletdrainer

> Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered. This is satire, obviously.

scriptsmith

If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano flags enabled, either because it's part of some Origin Trial / Early Stable Release or something, then web pages will have access to the new Prompt API which allows any webpage to initiate the (one-time) download of the ~2.7 GiB CPU or ~4.0 GiB GPU model using LanguageModel.create() https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api When Chrome 148 releases tomorrow, this will be the default behaviour on desktop. To download, it should check for 22 GiB free disk space on the volume where your Chrome data dir is, and at least double the model size of free space in your tmp dir.

lobito25

Anyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.

flossly

And that's why we have, promote, and (hopefully) all use Chromium on our Linuxes. Or Firefox of course.

Hamuko

This has to be some kind of a limited rollout, since none of my machines have this AI model installed even when Chrome is updated to the latest version. No indication that anything is being downloaded, since after updating to the latest version of Chrome on this machine, I'm seeing <100 kB/s download speeds for the entire system.

tzury

Well, npm install … did worse

PufPufPuf

If only there was an orange canine coming to help us

nsonha

it also installs an entire remote desktop stack on your computer without consent, and video codecs, and pdf reader... what is new here?