Where AI models hide on your Mac
Every model you ever tried is still on disk. A couple of
7B experiments here, one 70B download there – AI tooling quietly stacks
up to 100+ GB across four or five separate cache locations.
Hugging Face
du -sh ~/.cache/huggingface
huggingface-cli scan-cache # per-model breakdown
huggingface-cli delete-cache # interactive removal
Everything re-downloads on the next from_pretrained().
Ollama
ollama list # models with sizes
ollama rm llama3:70b # delete one
du -sh ~/.ollama/models
LM Studio
du -sh ~/.lmstudio/models # or ~/.cache/lm-studio on older versions
Delete models from the app's My Models tab, or remove the folders directly.
PyTorch, pip & friends
~/.cache/torch # torch hub checkpoints
~/Library/Caches/pip # wheel cache – pip cache purge
~/.cache/whisper # whisper checkpoints
Claude Code & other CLI agents
Agent CLIs keep session logs and caches too – smaller, but they add up
on heavy use: ~/.claude, ~/.codex.
CacheCleaner finds all of these in one scan – Hugging Face, Ollama and LM Studio models are listed per-location and marked ⚠️, since models are downloads you chose, not disposable caches. You decide what goes.
Get CacheCleaner for Mac