Remove Windows AI tool has gone viral.

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There are lots of things that have gone viral, for all sorts of different reasons. In July, a claim that the Amazon Ring doorbell was hacked on May 28, for example. Dear reader, it had not. In October, a story of mine did the going viral thing when I reported how Gmail passwords had been confirmed in a 183 million-account infostealer log leak. And they had. The latest viral posting, however, is not a news story, but it does concern a hack of sorts: a developer has released a tool to strip Windows 11 of its AI capabilities, and X is lapping it up.

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RemoveWindowsAI Script Nukes Microsoft AI

As first reported by Josh Quittner, CEO of Decrypt, the ‘RemoveWindowsAI’ tool that claims to get rid of Microsoft Windows 11 AI components, including Copilot, Recall and more, has gone viral after Tom Dörr, who tweets about AI projects, posted about it on X. The developer, known as zoicware, referring to the AI features and components of Windows 11, said that the script “aims to remove all of these features to improve user experience, privacy and security.”

That it has gone viral so quickly, Quittner said, reflects “persistent user concerns over privacy and performance in the company’s AI integrations” among Microsoft Windows users.

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The tool itself, the developer has said on GitHub, disables Windows registry keys, disables Copilot, disables Recall, disables Input insights and typed data harvesting, disables AI in Paint, removes the AI Fabric Service, disables AI voice effects, disables AI in settings search, and prevents the reinstallation of AI packages. It would appear to do this by way of a custom Windows Update package to prevent such installation in the component-based servicing store.

“Unfortunately, not all features and settings can be disabled via a script,” zoicware warned, but has provided a guide for the manual removal or disabling of additional AI features. I’m not a fan of anything that messes with Windows Update in any way, to be honest, and as such would recommend caution before installing this or any similar package. “The script is open-source and carries warnings to create backups before application,” Quittner pointed out.

X users, of course, did not disappoint with their comments. One said that they had already removed Microsoft AI, along with Windows itself, using Linux Arch. Another asked why anyone bothered with half measures and suggested it was better just to remove Windows 11.

I have reached out to Microsoft regarding the Remove Windows AI script, but have not received a statement at the time of publication.

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