The other day, I was attempting to clear up storage space on my (rather digitally cramped) iPhone 15 Pro. I went through the usual steps: deleting screenshots and duplicate photos, archiving lesser-used applications, and transferring text message threads to iCloud. One further move I made to reclaim a few extra gigabytes was to disable Apple Intelligence, which then promptly purged the on-device AI model files from my handset’s system.
Out of curiosity, I then switched over to my Pixel 10, which has its own equivalent set of AI models powered by Google Gemini. After poking around in Settings, I found that these on-device models were taking up a whopping 6.98 GB of internal storage space — roughly in the same ballpark as my iPhone’s 6.27GB Apple Intelligence allotment.
Considering Google’s all-hands-on-deck embrace of artifical intelligence, I was curious whether I’d be able to delete these particular AI Android models natively, or whether doing so would require root access. To my surprise, it turns out that Google lets you outright delete these models on its own Pixel hardware, which can net you back a ton of internal storage capacity.
Note that deleting on-device AI models won’t remove all AI feature sets across your Google Pixel. Many Gemini-powered features, including the main chatbot experience itself, rely on cloud-based AI models and will thus continue to function unless independently disabled.
How to clear storage and disable AICore on Google Pixel
The process is far simpler than I expected it to be
To clear internal storage taken up by on-device AI models, and to optionally disable these models as a whole, follow these steps on your Google Pixel:
- Launch Settings.
- Navigate to Apps > See all apps > AICore
- Next, tap or click on the Disable button.
- From here, tap or click on Storage & cache > Clear Storage.
- Finally, hit the Delete button to confirm your selection.
Note that by clearing storage and cache files, you’ll need to reload several AI-based features from the beginning the next time you interact with them. If you opt to disable AICore, on-device AI features will stop working altogether. If you ever change your mind and decide to re-enable AICore, doing so is as easy as navigating to Settings > Apps > See all apps > AICore > Enable.
