Strava Now Forces Premium Users to View AI-Generated Activity Summaries (Whether They Want to or Not).
It’s no longer possible to disable Strava’s AI-powered summaries. Around July or August, this feature, called “Athlete Intelligence,” became a built-in feature of the Premium subscription. If you have a free account, you still won’t see it, but if you subscribe to Strava Premium, summaries will be automatically added to all your activities.
What is Athlete Intelligence in Strava?
Athlete Intelligence, or AI for short, is a Strava feature that provides text responses to your workouts. It’s only available to premium subscribers. Strava uses the term “analytics” in these responses, but as far as I can tell, they’re simply repeating information from the workout description, sometimes with errors.
I briefly used this feature around the time it launched (I had a premium subscription at the time), but quickly turned it off when I realized it wasn’t providing me with any useful information. I asked my colleague Meredith Dietz, who also has a premium subscription, if she’d seen anything useful in her Athlete Intelligence system. She replied, “Usually it’s positive, which is good. But ultimately: useless.”
Meredith has written several other articles about why AI-generated fitness summaries are largely useless , and Strava’s AI meets all of these criteria: it doesn’t use enough context to understand what’s going on, it gives general advice as if it were personalized, and it’s overly confident in its use of incomplete data. She showed me a recent Athlete Intelligence summary that said a run was both “recovery” and included her “fastest pace in two weeks.” These are simply incompatible statements. Another post praised her for “performing well for a half marathon” on a run that, in Meredith’s words, “didn’t even come close to feeling like a half marathon.”
What was happening behind the scenes?
Previously, it was possible to disable artificial intelligence. When Strava launched Athlete Intelligence in October 2024, it was a “beta” feature, available only to premium users. Since then, as far as I remember, Strava’s support page has included instructions on how to opt out of Athlete Intelligence.
But things have changed recently. The last Wayback Machine snapshot containing these instructions is dated June 30, 2026. The August 4 snapshot removed both the question and the answer about the opt-out feature. On August 26, I noticed a Reddit thread where users were asking where the opt-out feature had gone. The support page now says, “There is no option to opt out of Athlete Intelligence.”
I asked what had happened and received a response from a Strava representative: “As is common for experimental features, Athlete Intelligence launched with an opt-out mechanism limited to the initial beta period. With the feature officially leaving beta, this opt-out mechanism is no longer available. We encourage all subscribers to click the ‘Give Feedback’ button to help us improve the analytics they provide.”
Athlete Intelligence officially exited beta last February. If the support page was updated over the next year and a half, it appears the opt-out option was removed much later. (The instructions previously said to click “leave beta,” but then changed to “leave Athlete Intelligence” sometime before June 21st of this year.) I asked Strava for clarification on the timeline and received the following response: “Thank you for the clarification, we are unable to provide further information.”
Why ‘Athlete Intelligence’ Was Such a Disappointment
In its February 2025 announcement, Strava claimed that over 80% of users found the Athlete Intelligence feature useful. This is hard to believe, given the shortcomings Meredith and I noticed in the AI’s own reports. Browsing Strava user forums, I often see complaints about the AI’s tone or points out its errors; I truly don’t see anyone praising it for its insights or its assistance in analyzing and planning workouts.
Meredith finds the summaries easy to ignore. I found them annoying, so I hid them while I still could. So far, I haven’t seen any complaints from unsubscribers about getting the summaries back; they may remain hidden. However, the option to turn them off is no longer available. You can still “leave feedback” on any response, but there used to be an option to opt out of Athlete Intelligence entirely. That option is no longer available, and judging by Strava’s statement, it’s unlikely to return.