LibreOffice will ship with zero artificial intelligence features in its standard installation — and The Document Foundation is marketing that absence as a selling point. In a blog post published September 3, the organization behind the free office suite stated plainly that "no AI is now a feature."

The move lands amid a wave of AI integration across commercial productivity suites. While major vendors push Copilots and generative assistants into default installs, The Document Foundation is taking the opposite position — at least for now.

Why did the foundation exclude AI?

The decision is not a matter of principle. The foundation stresses it does not oppose AI on ideological grounds. Instead, current AI technology fails the project's requirements in three areas: privacy, user control, and open standards.

That framing matters for enterprise buyers evaluating office suites under data-protection rules and procurement policies. The foundation is effectively arguing that today's AI offerings cannot satisfy the baseline expectations its users already hold for the rest of the software.

What conditions would change the decision?

The foundation laid out specific criteria any future AI solution would have to meet before it could enter LibreOffice. The list is short but demanding:

• Local execution choice: Users must be able to decide for themselves where the AI model runs.
• No telemetry: The AI must not collect telemetry data.
• No vendor lock-in: The solution must not lock users into a single vendor.
• Open format output: AI-generated content must use the open document format ODF.
• Fully optional: AI features must be entirely optional, never forced into the default experience.

If an AI solution emerges that meets all of these requirements, The Document Foundation says it will consider including it.

What does this mean for CIOs?

For IT leaders weighing LibreOffice against subscription-based alternatives, the announcement reinforces the suite's positioning on several fronts. The commitment to optional-only features and ODF output aligns with procurement strategies that prioritize document portability and long-term data accessibility.

The no-telemetry stance also addresses a recurring concern in regulated industries, where data sent to third-party AI services can create compliance exposure. By keeping AI out of the standard install entirely, the foundation removes that question for organizations deploying LibreOffice today.

LibreOffice has gained traction among organizations seeking to cut subscription costs, and public-sector migrations to the suite have made headlines in recent years. The new AI position gives those deployments a clear, documented policy: no AI runs in the standard installation, and nothing changes unless a solution arrives that satisfies every one of the foundation's published conditions.

Is the door open?

Yes — conditionally. The foundation's language leaves no ambiguity about the path forward. It is not "never"; it is "not yet, and not on these terms." Any vendor or community project hoping to bring AI to LibreOffice now has a published checklist: user-controlled execution location, zero telemetry, no lock-in, ODF output, and full optionality.

Until all five boxes are ticked, the suite's most prominent AI feature will remain its absence. For organizations that have grown wary of AI features appearing in their productivity tools without a formal decision, that absence is precisely the point — and, per The Document Foundation, a feature worth advertising.