Can an organisation turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27? MDM blocks it feature by feature, never as a wholeCan an organisation turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27? MDM blocks it feature by feature, never as a whole

John Gruber wrote on 6 October that some institutions with rules against AI are not allowing macOS 27 at all until Apple Intelligence can be removed, and 9to5Mac took up the point on 7 October.

Gruber, writing on Daring Fireball about the unofficial RemoveMacAI tool, said such places were therefore not buying new Mac hardware that only runs macOS 27, which Apple markets as Golden Gate. He named no institutions. 9to5Mac argued that Apple may need an official way to remove Apple Intelligence to protect Mac sales, and noted that Apple says organisations can only restrict the use of certain features. The new Mac mini and Mac Studio shipped on 22 September with macOS 27 installed, according to MacRumors.

What can device management switch off on macOS 27?

Apple's enterprise notes for macOS 27, support article 148830, list one new Apple Intelligence item: device management can now restrict Siri AI, Visual Intelligence and natural language editing of Calendar events. The full set is in Apple's published device management schema for the 27.0 release. The current controls are declarative settings, which work only on supervised Macs, and each one covers a single feature:

The older restriction keys that did the same jobs, such as allowWritingTools and allowGenmoji, were deprecated in macOS 26.4 in favour of these settings. There is a separate setting to force dictation to stay on the device.

What can it not do?

There is no setting in the schema that turns Apple Intelligence off as a whole, deletes the on-device models, or stops them downloading. According to MacRumors, the models download automatically once macOS 27 is installed, and RemoveMacAI works by using a configuration profile to switch off Apple's asset management service and blocking the download, relying partly on keys Apple has already deprecated. Apple says the models need up to 14GB, and MacRumors says some Macs show 30GB or more.

Our take

Gruber's point is narrower than the headlines around it, and stronger for that. An administrator can already make Apple Intelligence invisible to users by disabling every feature on that list, which is enough for most acceptable use policies. What they cannot do is certify that the models are not on the disk, and for an organisation whose rule is no AI software on our machines, rather than no AI use, that is the question an auditor asks. A list of switches that each need updating when Apple adds a feature is not the same answer as one switch.

The storage cost makes it worse on the cheapest machines. We reported that Apple Intelligence now asks for 14GB free on the newest iPhones, and on a 256GB Mac bought by the hundred for a school or a call centre that space is paid for and unused. RemoveMacAI shows the demand is real, but no IT department should build policy on an unofficial tool that depends on deprecated keys.

APPDOOK's reading is that Apple will eventually add a supervised-only setting to block the model download, much as it added AllowSiriAI this year, because it costs Apple little and removes an objection to buying Macs. Until it does, organisations with a strict policy have two choices: keep buying Macs that still run macOS 26 while they are sold, or treat per-feature restrictions as good enough and write the policy around use rather than presence.