Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
Huh? What’s the name of it then? My Chrome is but an .exe with 4mb to it and I don’t see any 4GB…
Edit: From Article, “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]”
So, morons who installed shitty AI are getting AI shafted - makes ALL the sense to me.
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.
Its a separate file (as any 4GB download would be).
Huh? What’s the name of it then? My Chrome is but an .exe with 4mb to it and I don’t see any 4GB…
Edit: From Article, “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]”
So, morons who installed shitty AI are getting AI shafted - makes ALL the sense to me.
You should not be calling anyone a moron if you think that .exe actually contains Google Chrome
It’s stated in the second paragraph:
Its a separate file (as any 4GB download would be).