How to Remove Copilot from Windows 11, and What Each Method Really Removes

There are three ways to get rid of Copilot and they do not do the same thing. People try one, see the icon disappear, and assume the rest followed. It usually did not.

Decide first what you actually want: the button gone from your taskbar, the feature unavailable to anyone on this machine, or the software not installed at all.

Method 1: hide the button

Settings, Personalisation, Taskbar, and turn off the Copilot toggle.

This removes an icon. The component stays installed, the keyboard shortcut may still open it, and nothing about data handling changes. It is the right answer if the icon was the whole problem, and it is worth being clear that it is not a removal.

Method 2: disable it by policy

On Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise and Education, gpedit.msc, then User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Copilot, and enable Turn off Windows Copilot.

The registry equivalent, which also works where the policy editor is absent:

reg add "HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot" /v TurnOffWindowsCopilot /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Sign out and back in. This is the method that holds, because a policy is re-applied rather than reversed by the next feature update. It is per user under HKCU; the machine wide form under HKLM covers every account.

Method 3: uninstall the package

Copilot ships as an app package, so it can be removed:

winget uninstall --id Microsoft.Copilot

or, in an elevated PowerShell:

Get-AppxPackage -Name "*Copilot*" | Remove-AppxPackage

Two caveats, and both matter. A feature update can reinstall it, which is why the policy above is the durable half of the job. And Get-AppxPackage without -AllUsers only removes it for the current account, so a second user on the machine still has it.

To stop it being provisioned for new accounts:

Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Where-Object DisplayName -like "*Copilot*" | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online

What is still there afterwards, said plainly

Removing Copilot does not remove Recall, Windows Search integration, or the diagnostic data Windows sends on its own. Those are separate features with separate switches, and treating the Copilot uninstall as a privacy fix overstates it considerably.

Nor does it change what Microsoft accounts, Edge, or Bing search from the Start menu do. If the reason you are here is data leaving the machine, the wider set of switches is in how to disable Windows 11 telemetry, and the honest limit is stated there too: consumer editions cannot be reduced to no telemetry at all.

Which method to use

juste l icone genante -> methode 1, dix secondes aucun utilisateur n y touche -> methode 2, la seule qui survit aux mises a jour rien d installe du tout -> methode 3 PUIS methode 2, dans cet ordre

The order in the third case is not arbitrary: uninstalling without the policy leaves the door open for a future update to bring it back, and you will not be told when that happens.

One thing not to do

Deleting files under WindowsApps by hand, or taking ownership of that folder, breaks the servicing stack in ways that surface weeks later as failed updates. The package manager exists for this, and the two commands above do the same job without leaving the system in a state Windows Update cannot reason about.

If you are rethinking the operating system rather than the assistant, the comparison is in Linux vs Windows security, and the shortlist in most secure Linux distros.