To clarify, this isn't a "memory leak," it's an issue with not de-duplicating or evicting copied model weights from a SIP-protected disk space. I'm also not sure the bug is CLI-specific. I definitely observed it with my CLI tool, Junco,, but I have another SwiftUI application where I'm observing the issue as well. Simply running the app from XCode copies the weights & metadata to the location above, and I've only been able to delete the accumulated ~104GB (645 model clones) through Recovery Mode.

I set up a probe for my project using an AFM LoRA, here's a summary: New files are written to /private/var/db/AppleIntelligencePlatform/AppModelAssets/ with a unique hash (not a content-based hash), copying lora.part.bin and metadata.json attributable to TGOnDeviceInferenceProviderService. These materialize per process invocation, and don't appear to be cleaned up. See FB22523518 from macOS 26.3.1 (a) (build 25D771280a) M4 Air (A3241)