In my mightily humble opinion, probably the worst thing to happen to Windows over the years has been AI. Maybe I’m just not the target market for it, but having Copilot buttons clog up my taskbar and apps wasn’t what I thought I’d be getting with Windows 11. And I know at least some of you feel the same, because someone’s gone out of their way to make a tool dedicated to removing all Windows 11’s AI features.
The creator, zoicware on GitHub, says: “The current 25H2 build of Windows 11 and future builds will include increasingly more AI features and components. This script aims to remove ALL of these features to improve user experience, privacy and security.”
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(Image credit: Microsoft)
But part of the utility is a custom Windows Update package that is aimed at stopping those AI features being patched back in with subsequent updates or patches down the line.
The specific registry keys it disables are:
- Disable Copilot
- Disable Recall
- Disable Input Insights and typing data harvesting
- Copilot in Edge
- Image Creator in Paint
- Remove AI Fabric Service
- Disable AI Actions
- Disable AI in Paint
- Disable Voice Access
- Disable AI Voice Effects
- Disable AI in Settings Search
But there are AI components that can’t be disabled via this script, such as Gaming Copilot or OneDrive AI, though the github repository does provide methods of disabling those in Windows settings.
There are other tools that can be used to debloat Windows in various ways, too—Windows Utility is a popular one—but I’m not sure whether these take as big of a sledgehammer to AI features as this new tool does.
I also wonder what using a tool like this will mean for Microsoft’s push towards Windows becoming an “agentic OS” and potentially having these agentic AI agents rummage through our files. Hopefully that can be nuked off the face of the planet, too.
I shouldn’t go too ham on Windows 11, though. It does look like it might have a nice new Run dialog box coming up in future updates. Silver linings, I suppose.
I do want to note again, that you ought to be careful just randomly downloading or entering scripts into Windows, especially if it’s messing with the registry. This isn’t Linux after all. But if you want to go through the script it’s all up on github, so you can go looking through exactly what it’s doing yourself just to be safe.
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