LibreOffice 26.8 has had the strongest first week of any release in the project’s history, surpassing 1 million downloads just seven days after launch.
According to The Document Foundation, the release was downloaded 1,031,162 times from LibreOffice’s official download page in its first week. Even more impressive, this number doesn’t include the many Linux users who got LibreOffice 26.8 through their distribution’s package repositories.
But the most interesting part came immediately afterward. Just one day after publishing those record download figures, TDF followed up with a post carrying a very direct title: “Yes, no AI is now a feature.” The wording leaves little room for interpretation about how the project wants to position its current approach to artificial intelligence.
The organization says it is not rejecting AI as a technology. Instead, it argues that an office suite used in schools, hospitals, public institutions, law firms, and other organizations should not add AI to its default configuration unless it meets LibreOffice’s principles.
The project is also equally firm on telemetry, saying that LibreOffice does not collect usage data and that any future AI functionality would have to follow the same rule.
Provider independence is another requirement. TDF says an AI feature tied exclusively to a single company’s API would amount to lock-in, so any future integration would need open interfaces that can work with multiple backends.
The same applies to document formats. AI-generated content would need to remain in OpenDocument Format and preserve document structure, styles, and semantics rather than introducing dependence on proprietary formats.
And perhaps most importantly, AI must remain entirely optional. Administrators should be able to install or remove it, while users who do not want AI should not see it in the interface at all.
TDF says that currently no integration meets all these requirements while being suitable for default deployment and long-term support throughout a LibreOffice release lifecycle. As a result, LibreOffice will continue shipping without built-in AI for now.
Users who want AI functionality are, of course, not blocked from using it. Third-party LibreOffice extensions exist, including options connecting to locally running models through Ollama, LM Studio, and OpenAI-compatible endpoints, but these extensions are maintained independently, not by TDF.
The Foundation also drew a clear distinction between LibreOffice and commercial office suites. It argues subscription-driven vendors have business incentives to add AI assistants, including higher-priced plans and tighter integration with their cloud infrastructure.
At the same time, TDF, as a nonprofit, does not face the same pressure and can wait until an implementation meets the project’s requirements.
That does not mean the door is permanently closed. TDF says it will evaluate future approaches as local inference becomes easier to run on ordinary hardware and open models continue to improve. Until then, however, its position is explicit: no AI will be included in LibreOffice’s default installation.
For additional details, see TDF’s post.