Disable GenAI assistant in Adobe Acrobat with Intune

Generative AI is all over the headlines, and that’s not empty hype. In the past year, generative artificial intelligence has captured the world’s imagination. This powerful type of artificial intelligence (AI) can create new content based on patterns it learns from existing data. Generative AI can add value by optimizing how organizations handle internal knowledge.

Adobe is also pivoting AI to enhance its products and create new Adobe Generative AI applications to meet the evolving market demand. And as a result of the same, we see Adobe adding AI Assistant to its Reader and Acrobat product. Though in beta as of now, this AI assistant is a new AI-powered conversational engine deeply integrated into PDF workflows and allows Adobe to scan of all your documents that are fed into Adobe Acrobat and Reader.

And here comes the concern.

If you have confidential customer information passing through Adobe product, this can be a violation of basic NDA. Further, If Adobe loses control of the data related to your documents that Adobe is scanning, that’s a data leak.

As such, in a corporate environment, you might want to disable this GenAI feature in Adobe to protect sensitive data, maintain brand consistency, comply with data privacy regulations, prevent potential misuse of AI-generated content, and avoid unintended alterations to critical documents, especially if there are concerns about employees using the feature without proper training or oversight.

To complicate this further, Adobe has begun rolling out their new generative AI tool for Acrobat products in enabled by default state.

Thus, if you are managing Windows in a corporate environment and know some of your users might be using Adobe Reader or Acrobat, you may want this feature to be disabled and stop Adobe from hoovering up all of your materials into their AI ingest systems.

But to disable this is a manual task.

For Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, the fix is to open the registry and go to reg_path Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown to create a new DWORD reg_key with the name bEnableGentech having value set to 0.

Disable GenAI assistant in Adobe Acrobat with Intune

If you are managing devices via Intune, this can be achieved very easily with a remediation script package as below.

Detection Script

$Path = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown"
$Name = "bEnableGentech"
$Value = 0

Try {
    $Registry = Get-ItemProperty -Path $Path -Name $Name -ErrorAction Stop | Select-Object -ExpandProperty $Name
    If ($Registry -eq $Value){
        Write-Output "Compliant"
        Exit 0
    } 
    else {
    Write-Warning "Not Compliant"
    Exit 1
    }
} 
Catch {
    Write-Warning "Not Compliant"
   Exit 1
}

Remediation Script

$regkey = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown"
$name = "bEnableGentech"
$value = 0

#Registry Template
If (!(Test-Path $regkey))
{
    New-Item -Path $regkey -ErrorAction stop
}

if (!(Get-ItemProperty -Path $regkey -Name $name -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue))
{
    New-ItemProperty -Path $regkey -Name $name -Value $value -PropertyType DWORD -ErrorAction stop
    write-output "remediation complete"
    exit 0
}

set-ItemProperty -Path $regkey -Name $name -Value $value -ErrorAction stop
write-output "remediation complete"
exit 0

End-user Experience

This is a device without the remediation script and thus the registry fix is not applied. As such, you can see Generative AI feature is available in Adobe.

Now with the Remediation script deployed, the registry entry gets created.

And with the presence of the registry fix, we do not see the Generative AI feature available anymore in Adobe.