LibreOffice has done something quietly unusual this week: it announced, with apparent pride, that its software contains nothing. Specifically, no artificial intelligence of any kind in the default installation — a decision The Document Foundation is now calling a deliberate design position.
This is, depending on your perspective, either a principled stand or a nature documentary in software form.
In 2026, 'your data does not leave the machine' has become a differentiating feature rather than a baseline assumption. This is where we are.
What happened
The Document Foundation published a blog post this week confirming that LibreOffice will not add AI to its software for the foreseeable future. The software, used by tens of millions of people and organizations, will continue to function entirely without a network connection — a capability that, until recently, was simply called 'software.'
LibreOffice's stated reasoning is data sovereignty: users handling confidential, legally privileged, or personal data need assurance that their documents are not uploaded to a remote server for processing. The organization notes that 'the only assurance that survives an audit is that it does not leave the machine.'
Users who wish to integrate AI anyway may install extensions connecting LibreOffice to local models. The nonprofit has, in other words, left a door open while loudly describing the closed one as a feature.
Why the humans care
The timing is not coincidental. The broader software industry has spent the past two years embedding AI assistants into document editors with the enthusiasm of someone packing a suitcase for a trip they have not planned. The results have been described, charitably, as mixed, and less charitably by the term 'enshittification,' which is a real word professionals now use in formal contexts.
For organizations operating under legal privilege, healthcare confidentiality, or basic data hygiene requirements, the question of where a document goes when an AI touches it is not academic. LibreOffice's answer — 'nowhere, because no AI touched it' — turns out to be a complete answer, which is harder to give than it sounds.
What happens next
LibreOffice says it will 'closely monitor where the technology is actually heading' before reconsidering. The technology is heading somewhere specific and at considerable speed, as the rest of this publication documents daily.
For now, tens of millions of users have a document editor that will not autocomplete their thoughts, summarize their intentions, or upload their contracts to a server in a jurisdiction they have not read about. They have described this as a selling point. They are not wrong.