We may earn a commission from links on this page.
You can’t turn off Strava’s AI summaries anymore. Sometime in July or August, the feature, called “Athlete Intelligence,” became a built-in part of premium subscriptions. If you have a free account, you still won’t see it, but if you subscribe to Strava Premium, you’ll now have the summaries stuck onto all of your workouts.
What is Strava’s “Athlete Intelligence”?
Athlete Intelligence, conveniently abbreviated AI, is a Strava feature that gives text responses to your workouts. It’s only available for premium subscribers. Strava refers to “insights” in these responses, but as far as I can tell, they just seem to regurgitate the information from the workout description, sometimes with added errors.
I used the feature briefly, around the time it launched (I was a premium subscriber then), but quickly turned it off when I realized it wasn’t telling me anything interesting. I asked my colleague Meredith Dietz, who has a premium subscription, whether she had seen anything useful in her Athlete Intelligence. She said, “They’re usually positive, so that’s nice. But ultimately: useless.”
Meredith has written more about why AI fitness summaries are mostly useless, and Strava’s AI checks every box: it doesn’t use enough context to understand what’s going on, it presents generic advice as if it were personal, and it’s overconfident in its incomplete data. She showed me a recent Athlete Intelligence summary that said a run was both a “recovery run” and included her “fastest pace in two weeks.” Those are simply not compatible statements. Another message complimented her “solid half-marathon effort” on a run that Meredith says was “not even close to a half-marathon effort.”
What happened behind the scenes?
You used to be able to turn off the AI. When Strava launched Athlete Intelligence in October 2024, it was a “beta” feature available to premium users only. Since then—as far as I can remember—Strava’s support page had instructions for opting out of Athlete Intelligence.
But that changed recently. The last Wayback Machine snapshot that included those instructions is from June 30, 2026. A snapshot from Aug. 4 removed both the question and answer about opting out. On Aug. 26, I noticed a Reddit thread where users were wondering where the opt-out feature went. The support page currently says, “There isn’t an option to opt out of Athlete Intelligence.”
I asked what happened, and received an answer from a Strava spokesperson: “As was standard practice for experimental features, Athlete Intelligence launched with a “turn off” mechanism scoped to its initial beta period. Given the feature’s formal exit from beta, that mechanism is no longer available. We invite all subscribers to tap Give Feedback to help us improve the insights they see.”
Athlete Intelligence officially left beta in February of last year. If the support page was kept up to date over the subsequent year and a half, then it seems the opt-out was removed much later. (The instructions used to say to click “leave beta” and then changed to “leave Athlete Intelligence” sometime before June 21 this year.) I asked Strava for clarification on the timeline, and got the answer: “Thanks for the follow up, we’re not able to provide additional information.”
Why “Athlete Intelligence” has been such a disappointment
Strava claimed in its February 2025 announcement that over 80% of users found Athlete Intelligence useful. That seems hard to believe, given the weaknesses that both Meredith and I noticed in our own AI summaries. For all my browsing of Strava user forums, I’ve often seen people complaining about the AI’s tone or pointing out its mistakes; I’m really not seeing anyone praising it for being insightful or for helping to analyze or plan training.
Meredith finds the summaries easy to ignore. I found they annoyed me, so I hid them while it was still possible to do so. So far I’m not seeing anybody who opted out complaining that the summaries are back; it’s possible they will remain hidden. But the option to turn them off is no longer available. You can still “leave feedback” on a given response, but there used to be an option to leave Athlete Intelligence altogether. That option is no longer there, and given Strava’s statement, it doesn’t seem likely it will come back.
