While building a cleanup tool, I pointed it at my own laptop and asked a question I'd never asked before: what have AI tools left on this disk? I expected a few hundred megabytes. The answer was just under two gigabytes — none of it visible in Windows' own cleanup tools, most of it in folders I'd never opened.
The exact numbers from that scan, because real numbers beat hand-waving:
- 821 MB —
C:\Users\me\.cache\huggingface. AI models downloaded by Python tools I'd tried over the months. I never chose this folder; every tool that touches Hugging Face uses it silently. - 629 MB — the Claude desktop app's cache folders. Not conversations — just cached interface files, the app being an Electron (bundled-browser) app that caches like a browser.
- 417 MB —
.cache\torch. Model weights PyTorch-based apps stashed away. - 11 MB — AI images in my Downloads folder, files literally named "ChatGPT Image May 24…" that I'd saved and forgotten.
Almost 1.9 GB. And I'm a light user of local AI — if you've ever installed Ollama or LM Studio and pulled a few models, your number isn't measured in megabytes at all: single models run 2–8 GB each, and they sit in hidden folders (.ollama\models, .lmstudio) that no disk-cleanup tool will ever show you.
Why every cleanup tool misses it
Windows' Storage Sense and the classic cleaners look where junk traditionally lives: temp folders, the recycle bin, browser caches, old update files. AI tooling is newer than those lists. Its data sits in dot-folders directly under your user profile — .cache, .ollama, .lmstudio — a naming convention borrowed from Linux that Windows tools have never bothered to learn. So the gigabytes just sit there, invisible to everything except a manual look.
What's safe to delete — honestly
The model caches (.cache\huggingface, .cache\torch): safe, with one honest catch. They're caches in the true sense — anything that needs a model re-downloads it on next use. That's exactly the catch: delete 800 MB of models today, and the next time some tool needs one, you're waiting on an 800 MB download. Clear these when you actually need the space back, not as a ritual.
Chat app caches: safe. The app rebuilds its cache and your conversations live on your account, not in those folders. Clearing them is the same as clearing a browser cache.
Ollama / LM Studio models: safe, same catch, bigger numbers. Both apps re-download any model from inside the app. If you stopped using local models months ago, this is usually the single biggest space win on the machine.
Generated images and videos you downloaded: yours — review, don't bulk-delete. That ChatGPT image in Downloads might be disposable, or it might be the logo draft you spent an evening on. Nothing automated should decide that; this category is a look-through-it-yourself job.
One more thing an audit like this surfaces, beyond space: it shows how much of a trail AI use leaves on a shared or work machine — which is a privacy topic more than a disk-space one, and I covered that side in what not to paste into ChatGPT or Copilot.
The scan that produced these numbers is a feature of RBS Debloater, the free tool I'm finishing now — it finds AI caches, models and traces across your disk, marks what's safely deletable versus what deserves your own look (your downloaded images are never auto-selected), and tells you the re-download cost before you click. Free on this site soon.