Apple removes macOS 27's Apple Intelligence opt-out, developer says
A blogger at dbushell.com writes that on 5 February 2025, at 9:51am, he found that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that phoned home with personal data every 15 minutes. Apple then still offered a setting to turn it off, though it was buried, and he switched it off.
Last week he upgraded straight from macOS 15 to macOS 27, skipping ten major versions in one jump though he himself skipped only one. Today he discovered that Apple had removed the switch that let him say no. Digging through the new settings, he turned Siri off again, but multiple Siri processes keep running anyway, consuming memory and writing data, and Apple Intelligence itself no longer appears in that control at all. He then found extra toggles hidden under Screen Time restrictions, a parental-control feature; they do not disable Apple Intelligence either, they only hide the AI tools from various menus. All of this, he says, was switched back on after the upgrade even though his Apple Intelligence and Siri setting was already off before he upgraded.
He also points to a 22.28 GB block of disk space he says the reactivated features have left behind, without saying which files or components make it up. Apple currently prices storage at £500 per terabyte on new MacBooks, and by that rate he works out the wasted space costs him about £11.
He frames the episode as one example of a wider pattern: that AI companies do not treat consent as optional. He lists three headlines he says he collected this month as evidence, without naming their publications or dates: that child sexual abuse material persists on X despite pledges from Elon Musk to remove it; that OpenAI is now facing more than 50 consumer-harm and wrongful-death lawsuits; and that OpenAI and Microsoft have themselves admitted large language models are built on stolen material and are harming the web. He closes by saying that when users are told to just turn a feature off and do so, the choice gets taken away again on the next update.
Key facts
- The author disabled a macOS 15.3 feature on 5 February 2025 after finding it phoned home with personal data every 15 minutes.
- Upgrading directly from macOS 15 to macOS 27, a jump of ten major versions, removed the toggle that had let him turn Apple Intelligence off.
- With Siri switched off again, several Siri processes still run in the background, using memory and writing data, and Apple Intelligence no longer appears in that control at all.
- Screen Time restriction settings, meant for parental controls, hide the AI tools from menus but do not actually disable Apple Intelligence.
- He calculates the reactivated features left a 22.28 GB block on disk, worth about £11 at Apple's stated £500-per-terabyte storage price on new MacBooks.
Why it matters
The post is a first-hand account of an opt-out disappearing on a major operating system upgrade, not a company announcement. If accurate, it means a setting a user relied on stopped being honored the moment the OS was updated, which is the kind of change that erodes trust in any 'turn it off' promise a platform makes about its AI features.
Who it affects
Mac users who had switched off Apple Intelligence and Siri before updating and expected that choice to carry over into macOS 27; more broadly, anyone who has been told a feature can simply be disabled and is relying on that being durable across updates.
How to use it
The author's own workaround was partial: switching Siri off again in macOS 27's main settings, plus digging into the Screen Time restrictions meant for parental controls, which hide the AI tools from menus but, by his account, do not disable Apple Intelligence itself. Neither route removed the Siri processes he found still running.
How solid is it
This is a single personal blog post and opinion piece, not an independent test or a report corroborated by other sources; the credibility score for this item is 72. The disk-space and cost figures are the author's own estimate built from Apple's published storage pricing, not a measured breakdown of what the 22.28 GB actually contains. The three lawsuit and content-moderation headlines he cites are presented as things he personally collected this month, without publication names, dates or links, so they stand as claims he is relaying rather than facts the post itself establishes.
Risks and caveats
No macOS version numbers are given for the releases between 15 and 27 that were skipped, and no component is named for the 22.28 GB the author blames on the upgrade, so neither claim can be checked against Apple's own release notes here. The post is openly an angry opinion piece rather than neutral reporting, and its broader claims about the AI industry are cited secondhand rather than verified in the article itself.
“AI bros keep telling me "just turn it off" and when I do they remove the choice.”
— the author, on dbushell.com