Apple Intelligence costs about 5 GB, and the 30 GB figure is something else
Measured on a Mac with it switched on: 5.2 GB of models. The much larger number people quote is usually a developer folder beside it.
Apple Intelligence downloads its models to your Mac and runs them there, which is the point of it and also the reason it costs disk space. The figure that circulates is usually far too high, because the folder it is measured from holds several unrelated things.
What the 5 GB is made of
| Asset type | Measured | What it does |
|---|---|---|
UAF_Siri_Understanding | 2,317 MB | The language understanding models |
LinguisticData | 1,162 MB | Per language data for text features |
UAF_Photos_MagicCleanup | 836 MB | Clean Up in Photos |
UAF_Speech_AutomaticSpeechRecognition | About 400 MB | On device dictation |
UAF_Siri_TextToSpeech | About 280 MB | Spoken responses |
Check yours, in one line
du -sk /System/Library/AssetsV2/* 2>/dev/null | sort -n | tail -12 |
awk '{s=$1; $1=""; printf "%8.2f GB %s\n", s/1048576, $0}'Read the largest line before concluding anything. If it names iOSSimulatorRuntime, that is Xcode's, not Apple Intelligence's, and it is covered in the simulator runtimes nobody deletes. The general case for this whole folder is the 30 GB of Apple asset packs.
Turning it off, and what that does and does not do
System Settings, Apple Intelligence and Siri, and switch it off. What that stops is the feature. What it does not do is delete the models on the spot: they are system managed, they live on a volume you cannot write to, and macOS decides when to release them.
- You cannot delete them by hand. The system volume is sealed and read only, so no
rmwill work, whatever a forum post says. - They may be reclaimed later, in the same way as purgeable space, when the disk comes under real pressure.
- Switching the feature back on redownloads them, so this is not a one way saving.
Whether it is worth doing
On a 256 GB Mac, 5 GB is two percent of the drive and the feature is either useful to you or it is not. That is a better way to decide than treating it as a cleanup task, because the space does not come back on demand.
If the machine is genuinely short, the folders that respond to being cleaned are elsewhere. What is safe to delete on a Mac is the ordered list, and it will almost always find more than 5 GB before it reaches anything Apple manages.
Common questions
How much disk space does Apple Intelligence use?
About 5 GB. Measured on macOS 26.6.2 with the feature on, the model and language assets totalled 5.20 GB, the largest single part being 2.3 GB of language understanding models.
Why do people say Apple Intelligence uses 30 GB?
Because they measure /System/Library/AssetsV2, which holds much more than Apple Intelligence. On the machine measured here that folder was 30.49 GB, of which 24.93 GB was iOS Simulator runtimes belonging to Xcode.
Does turning off Apple Intelligence free up space?
Not immediately. The models are system managed on a read only volume, so macOS decides when to release them, in the same way as purgeable space. Turning the feature back on downloads them again.
Can I delete the Apple Intelligence models manually?
No. They sit on the sealed system volume, which cannot be written to. Removing languages you do not use in Keyboard and Dictation settings is the supported way to reduce them.