Privacy is not a feature. It is a design choice that shapes every interaction a user has with their tools. When the team behind LibreOffice announced that AI will not be included in its default setup, citing user privacy, they made a deliberate statement about trust. They are choosing to respect the boundary between a user's local document and an external model, even as the rest of the industry races to embed inference engines into everything with a cursor. That is a refreshingly clear position, and one we fully support.
This decision lands at an interesting moment. In our article on Empowering builders: a free year of Claude Team plus $1,000 in credits, we celebrated the fact that companies are finding ways to put powerful AI into the hands of people who can build with it. That program is about enabling builders to experiment and invent. Equally, when we covered From demo to production: build Python AI libraries that deliver, the focus was on reliability and robustness in production systems, tools that work predictably at scale. None of those efforts contradict LibreOffice's approach. The difference is context. When a developer chooses to invoke an AI service, they are making an informed call about their own workflow and their own data. When an office suite defaults to an AI assistant that processes local spreadsheets and documents, the user may not even know the data has left their machine. LibreOffice is refusing to make that assumption for its users.
What this means in practical terms is that anyone who works with sensitive data, financial models, legal drafts, medical records, can continue to trust the document editor that has always been local by design. The trade-off is real: users will not get suggestions, formula completions, or auto-summaries out of the box. But they gain something that is far harder to retrofit: certainty. The open-source community's stance forces a question that every spreadsheet vendor should answer honestly: Where does my data go when I press "Generate"? If the answer is not "it stays on this machine," users deserve to know before they start working.
We see this as a foundational principle, not a rejection of AI. The team at LibreOffice is acknowledging that integration has to be opt-in, transparent, and, above all, safe for the user who did not ask for it. The specific consequence to watch is how this influences other open-source projects. If the steward of one of the largest office suites sets a line that AI stays out of the default build, others may follow. That would be a welcome shift, one where privacy is not negotiated in fine print, but baked into the architecture from the start.