LibreOffice 26.8 passes 1 million downloads in a week after marketing its lack of AI

A record week for LibreOffice

LibreOffice 26.8, released on 26 August, has become the most popular update in the office suite's nearly twenty-year history. According to a report by Manual do Usuário that reached the Hacker News front page, the installer was downloaded more than a million times in the first week alone — a figure that excludes updates delivered through Linux distribution repositories, so the real reach is larger still.

The detail that drew attention was what The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit that stewards the project, chose to emphasise in the release materials: the suite ships without generative AI features, and privacy was the stated reason.

"No AI is now a feature"

The day after the download milestone and the media coverage around it, TDF published a follow-up post signed by Italo Vignoli under the title "Yes, no AI is now a feature", setting out its position. Per Manual do Usuário, the foundation says it does not reject artificial intelligence outright; rather, no current offering satisfies a set of principles the project would require before any default integration:

• Execution remains under the user's control at all times
• No content leaves the computer without authorisation
• No telemetry of any kind
• No dependency on a single vendor
• No compromises on file formats
• Anything AI-related must be entirely optional

Because nothing on the market clears those bars, TDF currently points users who want AI capabilities to community-maintained plugins rather than bundling an assistant into the suite itself.

An economic argument, not just a technical one

The post also frames the decision in commercial terms. TDF argues its stance is not really about the technology itself, and it takes aim at rivals that dove into AI early: for subscription-driven vendors, an assistant is a convenient justification for raising prices and for keeping customers' documents inside the vendor's own infrastructure.

Not an anti-AI manifesto

Manual do Usuário cautions that TDF's fuller explanation may disappoint anyone who read the launch announcement as a wholesale rejection of AI. The author also allows that the record may partly reflect genuine work in version 26.8 — improvements to the writing system and typography that matter to the NGOs, government agencies and offices that rely on the suite. Their own wager, though, is on the "non-feature": the explicit promise of no built-in generative AI is what attracted much of the new audience.

Why it matters

Since 2023, AI assistants have been folded into software of almost every category, frequently without users asking for them. LibreOffice 26.8 is the clearest signal yet that a substantial audience wants the opposite — enough of one that the absence of AI can be marketed as a headline feature and convert directly into adoption.

It also sketches a middle path. Rather than refusing AI permanently, TDF has published concrete conditions — local execution, no telemetry, vendor independence, opt-in only — under which an integration would become acceptable. For the wider office-software market, a million downloads in a week for the suite that opted out is a data point that is hard to ignore, and it suggests the demand for AI-saturated defaults is not as universal as the current release cycle implies.