LibreOffice has declared the absence of AI a feature: your documents never leave your computer

The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind the free, open-source office suite LibreOffice, has announced that it won't be adding AI features to its document editor any time soon. Not because it rejects the technology, but because no available integration meets its conditions.

The position isn't new. Back with the release at the end of August, LibreOffice stressed that the software "contains no generative AI features". It's a deliberate decision to protect privacy and data security, and the foundation explains it with a sentence that sounds as if it were written for lawyers: "Any organisation that handles confidential, legally privileged or personal data must know where that data goes, and the only guarantee that survives an audit is that it never leaves the machine."

The logic is simple. Most AI tools require the document to be sent to a remote server, where it's unclear how long it stays and how it's handled. For a law firm or a hospital, that's no technical detail. LibreOffice's conditions are clear: the data stays on the device, and there's no dependence on any single AI vendor. "Until then, there will be no AI of any kind in the default installation; extensions will be available for those who want to integrate AI features," the statement says. Anyone who wants to can connect the editor to a local model through an add-on.

This runs against the entire industry. The big vendors push AI into every menu, sometimes at the cost of making the software worse to use, and programs whose sole purpose is to block or remove those features are already appearing. With this, LibreOffice joins the alternatives helping users get out of Big Tech's ecosystems.

Europe is starting to seriously count whose servers hold its documents: France is already moving 2.5 million government computers from Windows to Linux. At a moment like this, a free suite that guarantees your document never leaves the machine is more than a technical choice. Is anyone in Macedonia's institutions even asking this question - or are we waiting for some vendor to decide this for us too?