iOS 26 had a toggle you could select to disable all Apple Intelligence features.
That toggle was removed for iOS 27. Every AI feature has to be turned off individually: https://archive.ph/AE72I
There is a way of turning it off through Content Restrictions in Screen Time, but one Redditor reported that doing this disables CarPlay for some reason.
This is pretty disappointing.
Is the excellent OCR that lets me select text within an image Apple Intelligence? It uses local models. Or the prediction engine that optimizes battery life by backgrounding apps you're less likely to use, or applies updates while you're sleeping? What about the Latent Semantic Mapping text classification framework, which uses language models for fuzzy document search -- and has been around since 2007?
It wouldn't have made sense in the past to add a master kill switch for all these features, and it doesn't really make sense now to have one for the latest iteration.
With Apple Intelligence disabled and ~8GB reclaimed, you could still OCR, still use Siri, still separate subject from background, translate text, so on and such.
Now it’s all or nothing, shoving LLM weights into 128GB of storage for some people.
There’s a better approach.
To me that means if you go with the “nothing” route and disable Siri, the local latent models aren’t removed from storage until your device fills up, with the hope you enable Siri again.
Akin to all of Microsoft's apps with disparate Windows features pre-installed and unable to be removed from your device except through Storage Sense.