Windows 11's 5GB monthly .msu updates, AI is only part of the problem
Windows 11 monthly updates have grown to over 5GB in size, with the May 2025 update tripling in size compared to the previous month. While AI features like Copilot contribute to larger updates, the main cause lies in how Microsoft packages and distributes cumulative updates. The lack of new checkpoint baselines since 2024 has undermined efforts to reduce update sizes.
- ▪Monthly cumulative updates for Windows 11 now regularly exceed 4GB and can reach up to 5GB in the Microsoft Update Catalog.
- ▪The May 2025 update grew to over 4GB, nearly tripling in size from April 2025, despite only modest growth in decompressed content.
- ▪Microsoft introduced Checkpoint Cumulative Updates in Windows 11 24H2 to reduce update sizes, but no new checkpoints have been released since September 2024.
- ▪The update packages contain over 28,000 files, with the May 2025 update adding numerous MSIX files related to AI and text processing.
- ▪Although Express updates and UUP reduce download sizes for end users, the underlying catalog package sizes continue to grow significantly.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,755 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Windows Latest |
| Canonical URL | https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/04/29/i-investigated-windows-11s-massive-5gb-monthly-msu-updates-ai-is-only-part-of-the-problem/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Apr 2026 05:30:41 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-29T05:38:26.563Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-29T05:38:26.563Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cldYZz_QFyVd |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Home Windows 11 Windows 11 I investigated Windows 11’s massive 5GB monthly .msu updates, and AI is only part of the problem By Abhijith M B - April 29, 2026 0 Windows updates have grown drastically in size when compared to 2024 As it runs in the background, you might not have noticed it already, but Windows 11 updates are getting huge. Monthly cumulative updates downloaded via Update Catalog are now regularly crossing 4GB, and in recent cases, even touching 5GB. The numbers get even more absurd when you look at what’s inside those updates.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Windows Latest.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Windows Latest
