How to Disable AI Features in Windows, Chrome, Zoom, and More

Most AI features in the software you already use did not arrive because you asked for them. Windows 11 shipped Copilot in the taskbar. Chrome quietly grew Gemini flags. Zoom added an AI Companion tab to your account settings. Gmail turned on "smart features" for everyone by default. None of that is inherently bad — but knowing what's on, what it costs you in privacy or screen space, and how to turn it off when it doesn't serve you is a basic form of AI literacy, the same way knowing how to manage cookie consent or notification permissions is.

Librarian Jessamyn West, who runs the long-running personal site librarian.net (short link NoToAI.org), published exactly that kind of practical reference on August 17, 2026: a running, Creative Commons-licensed list of the exact menu paths to disable AI features across major software. It hit #1 on Hacker News, with 257 points and 156 comments — the kind of engagement that usually means the post is solving a real, widely-shared friction point rather than just being topical. West participated directly in the discussion thread, confirming the guide accepts corrections and contributions, and adding several browser recommendations live as commenters suggested them.

This post condenses the entries most relevant to developers and daily-driver software — treat it as a practitioner's reference, not exhaustive coverage of every consumer app in West's original list (Yahoo Mail and Amazon Alexa configuration, for instance, are in the source guide but out of scope here). If you also manage what a coding agent is allowed to touch on your machine, this pairs directly with explainx.ai's guides on restricting what Claude Desktop can access and Claude Code's permission modes — same underlying idea, applied to a different layer of your stack.

TL;DR: exact steps by product

Windows 11: Copilot lives in more places than the Start menu

Windows 11's Copilot isn't one toggle — it's scattered across at least four separate surfaces, which is part of why it's a common complaint. The cleanest removal is to right-click Copilot in the Start menu and choose Uninstall, or go through Start → Settings → Apps to remove it from there.

If Copilot still feels wedged into the OS shell after that — reappearing in the taskbar, for instance — go to Start → Settings → Personalization → Taskbar and turn off the Copilot toggle directly.

Two more Windows AI surfaces are easy to miss because they're not grouped with the main Copilot settings at all:

• File Explorer's AI features (Click to Do) live under Settings → Privacy & Security → Click to Do, entirely separate from the taskbar Copilot toggle.
• Notepad has its own independent Copilot toggle inside Notepad's own settings — turning off Copilot elsewhere in Windows does not touch it.

Office 365 apps compound this further: Outlook and its siblings each carry a separate "Enable Copilot" checkbox, and per Microsoft's own implementation, that setting only applies to the specific device you changed it on — it does not sync across your machines.

Browsers: flags, not a single settings page

Browser vendors have generally not consolidated AI toggles into one clean settings page — you're often digging through flags or scattered menus, which is exactly the friction West's guide is cataloguing.

Chrome: Open chrome://flags, search for "GLIC" (Google's in-browser AI layer) and separately for "Gemini," and set every matching flag to Disabled. There is no single consumer-facing Chrome setting for this as of this guide's publication — it's flags-only.

Edge: Similar story. edge://flags and search "AI" or "Copilot" for the flag-level toggles. Two settings-page items are also worth checking directly: Settings → Appearance to turn off the sidebar/Copilot button, and Settings → Languages to disable "Use Copilot for writing on the web," which otherwise offers AI-assisted writing suggestions inside text fields across the web.

Firefox 148+ is the outlier with an actual consolidated settings page: Settings → AI Controls → "Block AI Enhancements," with the option to select more granularly if you want some AI features but not others rather than an all-or-nothing switch.

Browsers with AI stripped out entirely

If flag-hunting isn't your preference, several browser projects remove AI features at the build level rather than making them a setting to hunt for. Jessamyn West added these to the guide live during the Hacker News discussion, based on commenter suggestions:

• Zen (Firefox-based) and Helium (Chromium-based) — both ship without the AI features their upstream browsers include.
• LibreWolf and Waterfox — per one HN commenter's characterization, both rip AI features out "with prejudice," i.e., not merely disabled by default but absent from the build.

This is the same instinct behind explainx.ai's comparison of closed-source AI products against local, open-source alternatives: sometimes the more reliable control isn't a settings toggle you have to re-check after every update, it's choosing software that doesn't ship the feature in the first place.

Communication and meeting tools

Slack: AI feature controls are managed at the workspace level by owners and admins, not per-user — if you want Slack's AI features off, that's a conversation with whoever administers your workspace rather than a personal settings change.

WhatsApp: Two separate toggles, easy to miss because they're in different settings sections. Settings → Chats → Suggestions & smart replies controls inline AI-generated reply suggestions. Settings → Notifications → AI message summaries controls whether WhatsApp summarizes notification content using AI — a distinct setting from the chat-level one.

Zoom: Sign in at zoom.us, then go to My Account → Settings → Zoom AI tab to disable Zoom's AI Companion features wholesale. Separately, under My Notes, disable "Allow participants to transcribe meetings" — this is a distinct meeting-transcription permission that doesn't live inside the main AI tab.

Google Workspace and Gmail

Google's "smart features" toggle in Gmail is one of the more consequential ones on this list because it governs data usage across products, not just a UI feature. To turn it off: open Gmail Settings (gear icon) → See all settings → General tab, find "Google Workspace smart features," click Manage, then toggle off both "Smart features in Google Workspace" and "Smart features in other Google products," and uncheck "Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet."

This is a good pairing with explainx.ai's coverage of Claude's shared chats getting indexed by Google search — both are examples of a default-on setting quietly extending an AI feature's reach further than most users would assume from the product's main UI.

Apple Intelligence and Siri: two separate toggles, not one

Apple Intelligence has an obvious off switch — Settings/System Settings → Apple Intelligence & Siri → turn off Apple Intelligence. What's less obvious, and worth calling out specifically because it catches people who assume turning off Apple Intelligence turns off everything: there's a separate Siri training toggle, "Learn from this application," that can remain active even with Apple Intelligence fully disabled.

• On Mac: System Settings → Apple Intelligence & Siri → About Siri, Dictation & Privacy.
• On iOS: Settings → Apple Intelligence & Siri → Apps → disable "Learn from this App" on a per-app basis.

If your goal is minimizing what Siri learns from your app usage specifically — as distinct from disabling the newer generative Apple Intelligence features — this is the toggle that actually controls that, and it's easy to miss because it's tucked a level deeper than the headline Apple Intelligence switch.

Search: AI Overviews and AI-free alternatives

Google hasn't shipped a persistent account-level setting to turn off AI Overviews as of this guide's publication. The workaround is a URL parameter: append &udm=14 to the end of a Google Search query string, which requests Google's "Web" results mode and suppresses the AI summary box while keeping normal organic results intact. It resets per search — there's no way to make it sticky without a browser extension or bookmarklet.

For a CSS-level fix instead of a per-search parameter, a Hacker News commenter shared a uBlock Origin filter — google.com##.hdzaWe — that hides specifically the AI Overview box via its CSS class, while leaving other non-AI answer blocks (like the knowledge panel) visible. Filters keyed to a specific CSS class name are brittle against Google's own redesigns, so treat it as a today-it-works fix rather than a permanent one.

If you'd rather not fight Google's UI at all, DuckDuckGo offers a dedicated AI-free experience at noai.duckduckgo.com.

The real limitation: CarPlay, Android Auto, and missing fallback states

The most substantive pushback in the Hacker News thread wasn't "AI is bad" — it was a specific, verifiable gap: Apple CarPlay and Android Auto route basic functionality through the assistant layer, and several commenters confirmed that texting, and in some cases turn-by-turn navigation, depends on Siri or Google Assistant being enabled — even for a driver who has otherwise disabled AI features everywhere else on their phone.

This is worth naming plainly rather than glossing over: it's a case where "just disable it" runs into products that were never built with a non-AI fallback path. Turning off Siri or Assistant at the phone level, for privacy or preference reasons, can silently take basic dashboard functionality with it. If you rely on CarPlay or Android Auto for messaging or navigation, test the specific feature you depend on after disabling the assistant, rather than assuming everything else keeps working.

It's the same class of problem explainx.ai covered when Claude Code's Auto Mode became the default for Pro, Max, and Team plans — a feature designed to reduce friction by defaulting to "on" inevitably surprises the subset of users whose workflow assumed the old default. The fix in both cases is the same: know what's on by default, and check the specific thing you depend on before you change it.

A few more tools commenters pointed to

The Hacker News thread surfaced a handful of adjacent tools worth knowing about even though they're outside West's original guide:

• Adios Alexa for Shopping — a Chrome/Firefox extension that removes Amazon's persistent "Alexa for Shopping" UI slider from the shopping experience.
• GrapheneOS — a de-Googled Android alternative, for readers who want to opt out of Google's assistant and data-collection layer at the OS level rather than toggling individual features. explainx.ai covered GrapheneOS's duress-wipe feature in the context of a federal prosecution if you want a sense of how far its privacy model goes.
• Codeberg, VSCodium, and LibreOffice were mentioned as non-AI alternatives to GitHub, VS Code, and Microsoft/Google Office respectively, for readers who'd rather choose tooling that doesn't ship AI features at all over configuring it away product by product.

Treat these as further reading rather than a checklist — the point isn't that everyone should switch OS or editor, it's that the option exists for anyone whose preference runs that direction.

What people are asking

Is this list exhaustive? No, and it isn't meant to be — West's original guide covers more consumer apps (Yahoo Mail, Amazon Alexa, and others) than are practical to reproduce here. This post prioritizes developer tools and daily-driver software; check librarian.net directly for the full, continuously updated list.

Will these steps go stale? Likely, at least partially — menu paths for fast-shipping products like Windows, Chrome, and Zoom change without much notice. West's guide is Creative Commons licensed specifically so it can be corrected and kept current by readers; treat any single snapshot, including this one, as accurate as of its stated date rather than permanent.

Does disabling these features cost me anything? Sometimes, yes — the CarPlay/Android Auto case above is the clearest example of a real trade-off, not just annoyance. Read what a feature actually does before turning it off if you're not sure whether something else depends on it.

Is there a common thread across all of these? Mostly: defaults. Very few of these AI features were something a user actively opted into — they were shipped on, and turning them off requires knowing where to look. That's the core value of a guide like this: it collapses the search time from "which of six settings menus is this in" to "here's the exact path."

Related reading

• How to Restrict What Claude Desktop Can Access on Your Computer
• Claude Code Permission Modes Explained
• Auto Mode Becomes the Default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team
• Claude Opus 5 rm -rf'd a Reddit User's Drive: The Sandbox Guide
• Claude Shared Chats Got Indexed by Google — Check Yours Now
• Closed-Source AI vs. Local, Open-Source Alternatives
• GrapheneOS Duress Wipe Now the Center of a Federal Prosecution
• Microsoft Presidio: Open-Source PII Detection and De-Identification Guide

Primary source: librarian.net (short link NoToAI.org) by Jessamyn West, Creative Commons licensed and open to corrections.

Menu paths, settings locations, and version numbers reflect Windows, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Zoom, Google Workspace, and Apple Intelligence as of August 17-18, 2026. Vendors change settings UI frequently — verify current menu locations in-app before relying on any specific path described here.