how to turn off Copilot and AI features in Windows 11, Digi Mart USA News: Users who want to avoid AI features in Windows 11 face a scattered set of controls rather than one master switch. Copilot and generative features now appear in Paint, Notepad, Photos, the Snipping Tool and File Explorer, while Copilot+ PCs add Recall and Click to Do.
According to a publisher article, the most important control is a settings page under Settings, Privacy & security, Text and image generation. Its main switch turns off Windows’ generative AI for every user on the device, and a list of apps below it lets users toggle AI for individual programs such as Notepad, Paint, Photos and Outlook.
The article notes that this switch only affects AI that runs on the device, so cloud-based AI features are not covered.
Notepad’s Rewrite and Summarize tools are a separate case. According to Microsoft’s Notepad help page cited by the publisher, these tools are powered by a cloud-based service and require a Microsoft account.
They can be turned off only inside Notepad, using the gear icon in the top right corner.
Right-click menu suggestions are controlled under Settings, Apps, Actions, where each app has its own switch. The publisher’s test device showed options for Photos, Paint and Teams.
Photos, for example, offered a visual search with Bing, which users can remove by turning off Photos in that list.
Copilot entries are also changing in File Explorer. According to Microsoft notice MC1515940, as reported by Topedia, eight Copilot actions for OneDrive files will be removed from the context menu starting in mid-November, and will be replaced by a single entry called Ask Copilot that appears only when the Copilot app is installed.
The Copilot app can be removed under Settings, Apps, Installed apps, but the publisher found that a Start menu entry labelled Copilot on its test device belonged to a different application, Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Recall and Click to Do are available only on Copilot+ PCs, which the publisher says require a 40 TOPS NPU, 16 GB of RAM and at least 50 GB of free storage, according to Microsoft’s Recall documentation. Recall does not save screenshots without user consent, and Microsoft’s privacy page says it can be removed using Turn Windows features on or off.
Click to Do is enabled by default and cannot be removed, but Microsoft’s help page says it can be disabled under Privacy & security, Click to Do.
For users on Windows 11 Pro and higher, Group Policy offers additional options. The publisher notes that the TurnOffWindowsCopilot policy is now listed by Microsoft as deprecated and may be removed in a future release.
Its article also says the publisher’s testing was done on a laptop that is not a Copilot+ PC, so Recall and Click to Do guidance relies on Microsoft’s documentation. The publisher advises checking the Text and image generation and Actions pages again after each major feature update, as new switches may be added.
