On October 6, 2026, The Document Foundation, the nonprofit that maintains the open-source office suite LibreOffice, confirmed it has no plans to add generative AI to the software’s default configuration, citing user privacy. The decision puts a product with an installed base in the hundreds of millions on the opposite
According to a TechCrunch AI report published on October 6, 2026, The Document Foundation, which maintains LibreOffice, stated that it has no plans to add AI features to the software's default configuration, citing user privacy as the reason. Default configuration refers to the set of features available out of the box after installation, so the statement means LibreOffice will not follow Microsoft 365 Copilot or Google Workspace Gemini in placing generative AI in menus and sidebars.
Based in Germany, the foundation is a nonprofit that operates on donations, membership fees and ecosystem partners such as Collabora and Allotropia. LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org in
The statement lands at a moment when office software is being rebuilt around AI. In November 2023, Microsoft began selling Copilot to enterprises at $30 per user per month; Google followed by embedding Gemini in Docs, Gmail and Meet with add-on pricing starting around $20 per user per month; WPS, OnlyOffice and Notion have also made AI writing a default entry point. For commercial vendors, AI is both a subscription renewal lever and a way to raise average revenue per seat, which makes putting it in the default interface almost inevitable.
At the same ti
Liu Gong argues that the real value of this news is not the missing feature but the fact that a technology long treated as a mandatory checkbox has been turned back into something that must be justified.
From a technical standpoint, putting generative AI into an office suite has a completely different cost structure from traditional features. LibreOffice performs layout, formula calculation and format conversion entirely on the local CPU, so saving a document carries no marginal cost. Copilot-style rewriting, summarizing and generation, by contrast, land on cloud GPUs with every call. Summarizing a 20-page document consumes billable tokens on the model side, and a free application that enables this by default would absorb an expense that grows with usage on behalf of every user. The compromise is an on-device small model, for example a 3-billion to 8-billion parameter model running through ONNX Runtime on a consumer laptop, but reliability in multilingual layout and spreadsheet formulas is still too uneven to make that a default.
On the business side, 'no AI' may currently be LibreOffice's clearest differentiator. Microsoft 365 Copilot and Google Gemini have already written AI costs into subscription prices; LibreOffice's zero licensing cost comes precisely from not promising that compute. For procurement teams with fixed budgets and mandatory compliance audits, a suite that never sends documents to an external server is easier to approve than one that writes summaries automatically. That is the practical reason customers like Schleswig-Holstein keep investing in migration.
For the industry, the statement offers a reference case: an open-source project can use 'off by default' to hand both the choice and the responsibility back to users. The risk is equally visible. As competitors turn AI into muscle memory, LibreOffice's feature gap could harden, and younger users may skip migration for lack of AI assistance. Liu Gong predicts that over the next 12 months the more realistic path is for the foundation to keep defaults clean while ecosystem partners such as Collabora offer optional AI modules in commercial builds, converting 'should we have AI' from a project decision into an installation decision.
- LibreOffice is distributed free under a GPL/LGPL/MPL tri-license, so its per-seat licensing cost is $0; Microsoft 365 Copilot is priced at $30 per user per month and Google Workspace Gemini add-ons start around $20 per user per month.
- At $30 per user per month, Copilot equals roughly 80 percent of a Microsoft 365 E3 base subscription at about $36 per user per month, meaning AI cost is now explicitly folded into commercial suite pricing.
- The Document Foundation has repeatedly cited a global user base in the hundreds of millions, while its annual bud
For the industry, the near term of three months should reinforce LibreOffice's procurement narrative in the public sector and privacy-sensitive industries, and competitors bidding for government customers may be pushed to add 'data stays local' options. Over a one-year horizon, if ecosystem partners release foundation-endorsed AI extensions, LibreOffice could establish a 'clean by default, enhanced on demand' model that other open-source projects copy.
For ordinary users, the short-term effect is that upgrades will not add AI buttons to the toolbar and
Questions worth exploring:
- Whether 'off by default' can become a general playbook for open-source software resisting AI bundling
- Whether on-device small models can close the AI capability gap for free office suites within 12 months
- How public-sector data compliance requirements will reshape the feature boundaries of office software
This item comes from TechCrunch AI (published 2026-10-06 15:25:00). Wenfeng Radar provides a Chinese/English summary and commentary on overseas AI developments; the original content is owned by its author.
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