Re: [chrome-ai-dev-preview-discuss] How to detect if the model is installed and ready?

[Kenji Baheux]

This is surprising.

While there are situations where availability() would return "downloadable" even though the model has already been downloaded, this is different and feels like a bug.

Would you mind filing a report with a repro?

On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 11:43 AM Colin Mummery <colin....@gmail.com> wrote:

In my HTML/JS SPA, I am running code in the background at app startup to set a global boolean to true if a model is already installed. I call modelFactory.availability(); but even though the model was fully installed in an earlier browser session this always returns the status 'downloading'. I checked https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started#model_download and the value I would expect is 'available'. The only work-around I found was to create a session with a monitor where the monitor immediately indicates the model is 100% downloaded. I'd prefer to have some simpler code at app startup which can determine if the model is already fully installed. Any suggestions for the simplest way to do this? As usual, Gemini 3.0 is not much help. Note: I get the same behavior in the Chrome Dev and Edge Dev browsers. I'm wondering if the 'downloading' status always appears because there is some model version checking logic in there that might download a newer model version.

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Kenji BAHEUX (my how-to)

Product Manager - Chrome

Google Japan

[Colin Mummery]

Thanks for the reply Keni, I actually deleted that post shortly after I created it because I wasn't able to get the 'downloading' state consistently. Sometimes my startup code would get the status 'available'. In the end, I solved this inconsistency by dealing with both states using the following code:

                  aiInstalled = false;

                  if (status === 'available') {
                        aiInstalled = true;
                        console.log("[init] aiInstalled set to true without needing create.");
                    } else if (status === 'downloading') {
const session = await modelFactory.create();
session.destroy();
aiInstalled = true;
 console.log("[init] aiInstalled set to true after successful create.");
   } else {
                        console.log("[init] aiInstalled remains false (model needs download or is restricted).");
                    }

This sets my global boolean aiInstalled correctly every time and the create() seems to ensure the model becomes ready to use. I'll do some more experimentation and when I'm certain there's something strange going on, I'll file a report.